For the Provincetown Independent

The world’s not necessarily a kind place, says multimedia artist Johannes Barfield, and he hints that there were so many obstacles to overcome between his childhood artistic ambitions and the studio space he currently occupies as a fellow at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center. But not once in an hour and a half did this reserved man whose art is rooted in his own personal history of growing up black in the South disclose specifically what those obstacles were.  He remained guarded. Like with his artwork, the things he chooses to disclose or hide are his decisions alone.

Born and raised an only child in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Barfield’s mother headed the city’s Red Cross’s Disaster Services Department and his father was an independent long-distance freight hauler. As a child Barfield would sometimes accompany a parent to a disaster zone or ride shotgun cross-country with his father. His early memories of being on the road with his parents gave him such a strong sense of freedom that he titled one of his earlier pieces from a line from the rapper, Common, “Who Freed Me, Lincoln or Cadillac?”

Now, during his seven-month residency in Provincetown, he’s diving deep into childhood memories, expressing complex emotions, preparing for both his upcoming solo show at FAWC’s Hudson D. Walker Gallery that opens Friday, February 21 – 26, and a show in September at Mary S. Byrd Gallery of Art at Augusta University in Georgia.

For both shows, his chief topics are family, memory, and cars that are representative of freedom, but also the danger of being black and being pulled over and having a gun put in your face. Barfield uses canvas, paint, asphalt that represents both the road and blackness, joint compound representing institutions, college ruled paper, wheat paste, the adhesive of choice for street artists, images printed on a low-end office printer for a low tech feel, and iron-rich red dirt he brought from North Carolina to make the aggregate that is one of Barfield’s pieces. Another definition of the word, aggregate, by the way, is a construction material used in building roads and also a word that aptly fits Barfield’s work. When he was a child, before he wanted to be an artist, Barfield dreamed of being an archeologist, sifting through layers of past cultures to understand them. That practice now carries over into his adult work.

His layered pieces start with a central image—for example, his mother in a car or the cartoon character, Marge Simpson during a fit of road rage, who the child/artist imagined racially ambiguous with her blue Afro. The images are printed on the ruled paper, the paper then attached to the canvas with the wheat paste and smeared with the joint compound. Then it appears as if the asphalt and red dirt have been hurled at the image, obscuring most of its original meaning or context. It is up to the viewer to decide if the artist is forcing or inviting them to be an archeologist, to sift through the layers, through the blackness, to see and experience Barfield’s memories through all that representational material and then…what? It seems the most plausible response is that Barfield is inviting the viewer to experience what it’s like for him to remember through all of that concealment, through all the layers, good and bad, that shroud his memory.

Barfield explains that with these materials he’s trying to express a complex emotion. “It’s not sad, it’s not happy, it’s not melancholy; it’s all of those things intertwined. I’m trying to focus beyond binaries, and more on tertiary, a place that is in between, a space that embodies all of those feelings, collapsing those feelings, creating an intersectionality, looking beyond good and bad.”

While there are artists who are non-white who wish to be identified simply as artists without their race or ethnicity attached to the label, Barfield is not one of them. “Those individuals are fine for their path,” he says. “They are individuals who may have encountered discrimination, all types of things to hold them in place from being able to progress, or they’re people who don’t want to be pigeonholed in this sub-category. I am very prideful and being black is definitely a part of me, and it’s not something I’d want to deny or put in the background; I don’t want to hide my face. Being a black artist in America means you’re already an obscurity. There are so many people who came before you who don’t look like you. I just want to be true to myself, how I feel and my experiences and being able to share that part of my truth, is the only thing I feel comfortable with and what I’d want to project.”

###

From the series, Cape Cod: Living Off The Land And The Sea

Every artist has to eat. A lot of artists teach. I continue with my established career of using two of my artistic talents for monetary gain: writing about and photographing the things that I care about. One of the things I do is string for the art editor of the Provincetown Banner, interviewing (but I shy away from that word; I tell them that we're just going to talk) and photographing the artists that either live on Cape Cod, or come through for other reasons.

By John Greiner-Ferris / Banner Correspondent
Posted Sep 18, 2019 at 8:33 PM

Theater is not just a spectator sport. It’s a collaborative art form that requires the active participation of everyone involved, including audience members. That’s just one of the reasons Fred Abrahamse and Marcel Meyer have been returning to the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival with their troupe from Cape Town, South Africa, since they made their debut here in 2012.

“I think the great thing about festivals like the Tennessee Williams festival is that you are performing to a house full of people who are there because they like theater or love Tennessee Williams,” Abrahamse says. “When you perform in a traditional theater in a town, at least 50 percent of the audience has been dragged there by a partner or it’s a charity night. But when you play at something like the Tennessee Williams Festival, they just drink it in, and it’s fantastic.”

This year, Abrahamse and Meyer are spending the weeks leading up to the festival in residence at the Provincetown Theater, performing Yukio Mishima’s 1954 Noh play, “The Lady Aoi” (pronounced ow-wee), a festival favorite from 2014. Once the festival itself begins, on Thursday, Sept. 26 (through Sunday, Sept. 29), Abrahamse and Meyer Productions will perform “The Lady Aoi” in repertory at the Provincetown Theater with a Noh-inspired production of Williams’ “The Night of the Iguana.”

A craving for passionate theater and a love of the classics are what brought Abrahamse and Meyer together — they met 15 years ago when Meyer auditioned for Abrahamse in “Much Ado about Nothing.”

“I love classical theater,” Abrahamse says. “I’ve never been a great avant-garde fan. Give me a big Shakespeare or O’Neill or Williams play. I like working with text, and I suppose what united us was the love of examining classical pieces through text. The text always informs our work.”

Meyer agrees, fervently. “Great writing makes me hungry,” he says. “Because the writing is always the starting point. Being an actor, you are a servant, you are a tool to something that is bigger and greater than you. Playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Shakespeare and Mishima had this incredible gift to be able to put into words the human experience, and to bring that to life is a great honor.”

Meyer is an interesting person to watch. He is muscular, with dark eyes that observe. He sits with his legs pulled up under him as if reserving his energy until, like an actor making a strong choice, he delivers on an emotion and speaks clearly and definitively. In “The Lady Aoi,” he plays Lady Rokujo, the spurned lover of Prince Genji, and once the festival begins, he will also play Lawrence Shannon, the defrocked minister in “The Night of the Iguana.”

Cape Town to Cape Cod
What: “The Lady Aoi,” by Yukio Mishima, performed by Abrahamse and Meyer Productions
When: 7 pm Thursday-Saturday, 2 pm Sunday
Where: Provincetown Theater, 238 Bradford St.
Admission: $29-$35, seniors/students $24, at provincetowntheater.org

Abrahamse and Meyer know their Williams and Mishima — “aliens with exceptional skills” is how the U.S. State Department described the two South Africans when they were granted visas. And Meyer is delightfully adept at laying out the historical background for how Mishima’s work and friendship influenced Williams, which the reason their work is paired at the 2019 festival.

“Williams and Mishima saw each other several times in Japan and in the States and became very good friends,” Meyer says. “But on Williams’ first trip to Japan, in ’57 or ’58, Mishima took him to see several Noh and Kabuki plays. Williams was working on ‘Iguana’ and ‘The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.’ He was working on what would eventually become ‘In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel.’ And from having spent time in Japan and having seen all these Japanese plays, he then starts to integrate conventions and structures of Japanese theater in his own plays.”

It wasn’t an easy transition. “The final outcome of western drama is catharsis,” Meyer says. “The essence of Noh theater is the beauty of human suffering. It’s about that whole Buddhist philosophy of releasing the things we cling to in this world. One doesn’t normally think of ‘Iguana’ as a Japanese play, but it’s steeped in Asian aesthetic and philosophy. ‘Iguana’ was Williams’ last big hit on Broadway, but when he thoroughly integrated Japanese culture in ‘Milk Train,’ the critics at the time derided him for having gone crazy. ‘Iguana’ sits on the cusp. It’s going to be interesting to see it this year, surrounded by all this Japanese and Japanese-inspired writing.”

Abrahamse, who is directing “The Night of the Iguana” (Meyer designed the set and costumes), says, “What’s lovely is you don’t need all the trimmings of traditional Western theater.”

David Drake, the artistic director of the Provincetown Theater, describes Abrahamse and Meyer Productions as “world theater,” a term that Meyer uses as well. “Great writing belongs to everyone,” he says without a trace of defensiveness when the conversation turns to identity politics — specifically, why two Caucasian men from South Africa should perform Noh theater — and just who has and who hasn’t the right to tell another’s story.

“What qualifies a Japanese theater company to do Shakespeare?” Meyer asks. “To box Mishima into being a playwright that can only be touched by Asian actors is crazy, because that diminishes how important he is as a writer. ... Williams and Mishima were right about the human condition, that it is universal whether you’re in Australia or Africa or New Zealand or the States. The basic human things are the same, but at the moment people are constantly trying to tell us that we are different. We are in such a dangerous time, because there is a faction of crazy people telling us what we should be doing.”

There is a 20-year age difference between Abrahamse and Meyer. Abrahamse, the older of the two, lived through apartheid and liberation and the corruption that has ensued. “You ask us what it’s like to be here in Provincetown,” he says. “You don’t lock your doors here. We lock our bikes, and people say, ‘You don’t have to lock your bikes — it’s Provincetown.’ Marcel and I live in a province where 47 to 50 people in the city a week are murdered. I think every single South African has a family member, friend or neighbor who’s been subject to violence. So when we tackle something like Williams, who deals with the broken spirit, who deals with the other, who deals with physically as well as emotionally crippled people, we are able to kind of go straight to the marrow.”

Every artist has to eat. A lot of artists teach. I continue with my established career of using two of my artistic talents for monetary gain: writing about and photographing the things that I care about. One of the things I do is string for the art editor of the Provincetown Banner, interviewing (but I shy away from that word; I tell them that we're just going to talk) and photographing the artists that either live on Cape Cod, or come through for other reasons.

Truro painter Thomas Watson goes forward into the past
By John Greiner-Ferris / Banner Correspondent
Posted Aug 1, 2019 at 8:36 AM

When it comes down to it, most of us simply want to find our place in this world, and our lives are a quest to fulfill that need. Truro painter Thomas A.D. Watson might ponder this notion a little more than most of us, though, because it often seems that he was born in the wrong time period — almost a century too late. That weighs on him.

Watson grew up in rural Vermont in a self-sufficient family that hunted, fished, grew its own food, and even made its own toys. It was a hard life, but to this day, Watson continues to admire its simplicity and down-to-earth values. His happy childhood ended when his parents divorced and his mother moved to Cape Cod, while his father, an accomplished illustrator, stayed in Vermont. From the time he was 12 to 18 years old, Watson never saw his father. “I did live with Dad for a year after college,” Watson says, “and it drove me nuts, because he was married to his work. It was all he thought about.” But time may have tempered that memory. After a moment’s pause, Watson continues, “I can relate to that now. I’ll be 54 this September, and there are creative things I want to accomplish.”

It also drove Watson nuts that his father pursued illustration instead of fine art painting, as his grandfather did — his father’s father — who was a founder and editor of American Artist Magazine. “Dad would have made an excellent fine artist,” Watson says. “Instead, he got into the illustration racket.”

Watson, a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, has found success as a fine artist, and he has done it on his own terms. While his work is in private collections and those of corporations, museums and embassies around the world, the only way to see it locally is to visit him at his studio at 45 Depot Road during visiting hours (9 a.m. to noon on Tuesdays and Thursdays, June to September) or by appointment (call 508-349-1631, or email tadw@thomasadwatson.com). He also has an annual studio reception, and the next one is on Tuesday from 5 to 8 p.m. “I’ve always been proud that I’ve sold my own work,” Watson says. “And I’ve especially liked the chance to interact with the people who buy it.”

Watson says that the reason he paints is to spend time with the ghosts of his past. Those ghosts include a mother whom he loved dearly, an older brother who was his childhood hero, the grandfather he never knew, and, of course, his illustrator father. Look at one of his recent landscapes, and that yearning for the past becomes clear. Watson’s timeless, slightly abstracted paintings of the Cape and the Adirondacks seem to ache for that sense of place he had growing up in Vermont. His paintings are almost completely devoid of human beings, and if one or two figures do happen to make an appearance, they are depicted small and at a distance, completely subservient to the landscape. Watson seems to paint from the haunted viewpoint of a man who has gone out the back door to take a walk to clear his head, saying he’ll be back in an hour. And you just don’t know: maybe he will come back, or maybe he won’t.

It’s not that Watson lives in the past — he seems to live because of it. Talking about a recent trip to the Adirondacks with his teenage son, Watson revels in the father-son memories he has collected — how he and his son woke every morning before dawn to fish for trout; how throughout the day he and his son sat side by side, Watson painting and his son tying fishing flies; how his son unpacked the copy of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories that he had given him but never read — “Some of the best outdoor literature out there,” Watson says. But the real clincher to the trip was the day that Watson’s son, after rowing an Adirondack guide boat, expressed an interest in owning one. An old-timer had one in his barn and gave it to him, and Watson and his son together will be refurbishing it this fall. “Because I missed out on so many years with my father, I thought, here’s my chance to get those years back,” Watson says. “When periods of harmony and happiness come down the pike, you take them, because the opportunity will go away.”

Watson is a shy, reclusive man. “I didn’t inherit the gene to interact with people,” he says. A couple of years ago he began questioning his role as an artist in the community in which he now lives, not where he lived as a child. This led him to begin painting the boats that work the waters around Cape Cod, and that, in turn, has led to his being asked to make a painting of the fishing boat Joan and Tom for next year’s Blessing of the Fleet. The request delights him, and makes him proud. “This is a way I can give something back to the fishing community,” he says. And, maybe, it will help him find that sense of place and purpose in life.

https://provincetown.wickedlocal.com/entertainment/20190801/truro-painter-thomas-watson-goes-forward-into-past

Every artist has to eat. A lot of artists teach. I continue with my established career of using two of my artistic talents for monetary gain: writing about and photographing the things that I care about. One of the things I do is string for the art editor of the Provincetown Banner, interviewing (but I shy away from that word; I tell them that we're just going to talk) and photographing the artists that either live on Cape Cod, or come through for other reasons.

Erika Wastrom paints the world she knows
By John Greiner-Ferris / Banner Correspondent
Posted Jul 18, 2019 at 4:33 PM

Artists are often advised to seek out subject matter close to home, to deeply explore the things of which they already have profound personal knowledge and understanding. It’s advice that is often ignored, so it is refreshing to walk into West Barnstable painter Erika Wastrom’s little barn studio and be treated to some very intimate, slightly abstracted, colorful paintings, all about 16 inches square or so, of the things and people that make up her life.

These are paintings she is pulling together for her upcoming show at Gaa Gallery, which will open this Friday alongside the work of Jane Corrigan. They will appear in Gaa’s Provincetown Project Space, a smaller gallery well-suited for the scale of her work.
Wastrom is busy. She has a busy, thoughtful mind that spins and charges, stops short, nearly throwing the rider, then she nimbly changes directions, bumping into herself on the way back, before tearing off in a completely different direction. On this particular day, along with her show, she’s also busy shepherding her two toddlers.

It’s definitely a family thing at her cedar-shake homestead, which sits on the edge of a marsh, set back from the road on the Old King’s Highway. Wastrom’s boat- builder father, Bob, was minding the boys. He then handed them along to her husband, Dan, who runs a landscaping company and rearranged his schedule so that an interview could take place — an interview about Wastrom being a Cape Cod painter and juggling the roles of artist, wife and mother.

A few points to know about Wastrom’s earlier years: She is a 13th-generation Cape Codder, claiming that title back to Constance Hopkins and the Mayflower. (“It’s no big deal,” she says, offhandedly. “There are a lot of us.”) Outer Cape artists Jim Peters and Vicky Tomayko were her teachers at the Lighthouse Charter School. She concentrated in ceramics at Alfred University, where, if anything, she gained an appreciation for surface and an interest in objects. Some of her more productive, formative years came as a grad student at Boston University, or, as some of the women artists called it, BU: Big and Ugly, in reference to the big-ass paintings that were in vogue there at the time. “It wasn’t who I was at all, and it was then that I started painting small,” Wastrom says. “At first, I was nervous, and I thought I’d be ripped apart in my critiques. But I think if I’ve got something big to say, it will come through even if the painting is small.”

And in the end, size mattered less than attitude. “It was at BU where I became more comfortable with myself and my perspective,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to make serious work, and I constantly ask myself, ‘What do I have to say?’ If my paintings don’t have purpose, what’s the point to them?”

It was also at BU that her work caused a fight between her professors. Is it whimsical? If it is, so what? What’s wrong with whimsical? “I like these intimate views,” Wastrom says, looking around at her studio. “I like that they’re small. There’s something about them that is reminiscent of illustrations. They could be a page from a children’s book.”
John Walker, under whom Wastrom studied at BU, told her just to go in the studio and make things. “He’d say, ‘Don’t overthink it.’ If you can let go of being self-conscious, that’s when something interesting happens.”

She’s been painting almost exclusively on paper for about 10 years. “I love paper, because the surface of the paper is fragile, but the surface also does things that canvas and panels can’t do,” she says. “I’m always accessing Matisse,” she adds. “Color holds air within the flat space.”

Wastrom doesn’t consider herself a regional artist. “These aren’t Cape Cod paintings,” she says. “I do think my colors come from the Cape. If you walk the beach at dusk, the sand is a muted neon. If you really look, you’ll see that. But I’m not dealing with Cape Cod. I’m dealing with being a wife and a mother. There are a lot of myths about being an artist and being a mother and an artist. I want to have it all.”

She paints when her kids nap in the afternoon and when they sleep at night. And given her time constraints, the smaller size format makes sense. She thinks of the 84-year-old British painter, Rose Wylie. “I’m looking forward to being an old lady,” Wastrom says.

https://provincetown.wickedlocal.com/entertainment/20190718/erika-wastrom-paints-world-she-knows

Mants Landing. The light is soft from the overcast; it's like being in a giant lightbox the light is so consistent. The colors seem vivid, but they don't feel that way. A hurricane churning up the coast, way out to sea.