The magical, mystical experience of a summer sunset from Race Point Beach is what lies behind this most recent group of Wave paintings by Stephen Bron. Completing his earlier exhibition from July, these paintings dazzle and crash and swoosh in a bravura display of painterly exuberance. These are not paintings of depiction, but rather of immersion - one feels entirely wrapped up in the experience of viewing them. The usual imagery of cool blues and greens is transformed into a fiery display of blazing colors, all touched by the light of the setting summer sun.
What does it take to paint a sunset without it withering into cliché? How to paint the ocean or waves without descending into banality? Gustave Courbet obsessed about this in his “sea landscapes” - glorious expeditions into primal sensations. One can almost hear the wind and waves in his paintings. His painting The Wave 1869 seems concrete and monumental, yet there is no indication of land. The viewer is totally immersed in the region between ocean and sky. But then he make us realize that there really is no area between - we inhabit all these realms together at once.
Hokusai’s The Great Wave off the Coast of Kanagawa (1831) was the focus of a recent major exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The wave threatens the boats, yet transfixes us with its beauty - it is as awe inspiring as the placid peak of Mt. Fuji in the background.
And as I write this on this storm tossed morning in Provincetown, as Hurricane Lee passes by, I am brought back to the greatest (in my opinion) painter of these local waters - Pat de Groot. Her hyper focus on the appearance, light, mood and feel of the harbor or back shore, shorn of trite anecdote, was channeled through her entire physical being, as she immersed herself in the act of painting - using knife, not brush, like some samurai totally attuned to his purpose.
Stephen Bron is a young painter who is staying true to his own inner vision of painting. He is drawn to nature, whether as the sole (soul) subject, or as a major element in his work. And, like Pat, he somehow manages to convey the enormity of the experience within a small scale. At first, in these sunset paintings inspired by Race Point Beach, the oranges, deep reds, violets and blues seem jarring, somehow not what our intellect tells us is “true”, but then we see… the way the smooth underbelly of the wave is painted with broad, smooth strokes, the shocking glare of the dazzling light on the surface as the bold gesture of the crashing wave cuts across the image, and the dazzle and cross strokes take our mind up and out of the picture, reminding us, as in the Courbet, of our place firmly within this spectacle of Nature, and reminding us of its transience. And ours as well.