A Little Bit of Provence in
Provincetown
When Gail Fields paints in her Provincetown studio, she is working from her mind. Figures and forms emerge from pure imagination as she allows the colors to play. Guided by her sense of color, Fields is attracted to flowers predominantly—but not exclusively. Her evocative paintings of fields, beaches, and flower patches offer familiar subjects, but they somehow feel different.
“Two years ago, I was in Provence, and part of the countryside had a feeling about it and I just brought back those memories with me,” Fields explains.
This feeling one gets from looking at Fields’ flowers can be experienced locally at the Cortile Gallery (234 Commercial St., Provincetown) all summer. But recently, Fields was honored with her own show at the Cape Cod Museum of Art (off Route 6A in Dennis). The Museum’s curator, Michael Giaquinto saw Fields’ work while visiting her husband Charles, a photographer.
“[He] was at our studio. He saw my paintings and he said, ‘Wow, Gail. You have something to say’,” Fields recalls. Within a year, her solo exhibition was mounted. It continues through July 19th.
Her Impressionist-style paintings each have their own identity. Fields of Flowers features muted pastel colors with thick chunks of milky green oil paint applied with a palette knife. Meanwhile, Come This Way depicts a forest path in fiery oranges and deep greens, brushed on flat with a quieter touch.
Then there’s her Sunflowers Celebrate, which features bold colors—blue, red, yellow, with a smooth surface; pretty, but not quiet at all. And Way Out on the Horizon, a subtle beach scene with shades of purple and red amid the beige of the sand, blues and greens mingling in the water, seems a completely different type of work.
“It depends on what mood I’m in,” Fields explains. “They’re two sides of my personality, the quiet side and the more vivacious side.”
Fields studied art at Parsons School of Design in New York and painted there for a while before settling down with her husband and having a family in Connecticut. It was a vacation in Provincetown that drew her here permanently.
“We just took a Labor Day vacation and [my husband Charles] was in town with his camera and he just felt there was something there he could capture,” she explains. Fields also has a background in graphic design and so she and Charles worked together on a number of photography books together: Cape Cod and the National Seashore; Carnival—Provincetown; Provincetown and the National Seashore; and others.
Her work was not always as it is right now. With her background in publishing and graphic design, Fields had a very different approach to painting flowers a few years ago. She painted them with a kind of photographic accuracy that she now rejects in her work. The flowers are not painted with the focus on intricate details. As astounding as those little details of nature can be, Fields works more with the suggestion of a particular form. Through her use of color and the imaginative process, the paintings elicit an emotional, visceral response in the viewer—as in a memory or a dream of flowers, rather than the real flowers themselves.
