Space at Alice
220 Westminster Street
at the corner of Eddy Street
621-6127
www.artsandbusinessri.org

June 14 through July 21
Rediscovering Nature (in an Unnatural World): Paintings by Paula
Martiesian
and Michele Provost
Artists opening reception June 14, 5 to 8 p.m.
Gallery Night receptions June 21, 5 to 9 p.m.
and July 19, 5 to 9 p.m.

The Space at Alice, in conjunction with Cornish Associates, presents recent paintings by Paula Martiesian and Michele Provost. Martiesian and Provost first met in 2003 at the suggestion of fellow painter Bunny Harvey. Harvey thought the two painters shared common interests and would benefit from each others’ company. Over time the two painters became colleagues and friends.

Both Martiesian and Provost work exclusively from nature, responding to what they see with very unique approaches to color, abstracted space and line. Both create not just individual paintings, but sophisticated spatial and philosophical environments - locales that they return to again and again to explore from different perspectives.

Yet the two artists are radically different. Martiesian is a colorist who uses saturated hues, abstracted space and definitive line to translate what she sees in real life to the canvas. Martiesian states, ” My inspiration is not literal, but environmental. I have always been in love with trees, rocks, water - life that isn’t defined by right angles and straight lines. I fantasize about what the world might have looked like before mankind arrived and I search my immediate surroundings for hints of that world.

Many who are fans of my paintings believe my works are abstractions, but I quite literally “see” the scenes that I paint in the urban and rural green spaces around me. I accentuate the landscape I love - wild, unkempt and irreverent - and avoid certain elements altogether. My landscapes have no fences, no manmade grids, no telephone wires. They are microcosms of a world without human interference.”

Provost makes almost magical landscapes by interweaving strong shapes with a central notion of line that entwines, binds and finally, creates mass. Her landscapes are built on years of observation, a viewing of specific places that have grown to almost mythic proportions. Using painter’s mediums, Provost layers, scrapes and embeds line and color, finally building a surface that combines the gesture of drawing with the sensuous qualities of painting.

Provost states,” Juxtaposing tensions and relaxation, directing the eye from clue to clue, depicting interiority, the straining to describe and comprehend the ineffable, the ceaseless seeking to find the perfect memory of that momentary flash of perfect clarity, the attempt to recognize that which “we haven’t the subtlety of heart to see”[Pynchon], the paintings become visual metaphors and mysteries for the process of thought, understanding and the substance commonly referred to as life.”