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ARTHUR
COHEN
Provincetown
Light
Paintings
Internationally
renowned painter ARTHUR COHEN is
a virtuoso, a master of knowing just when the last note of a painting is
complete. Cohen, now 77, has been painting Provincetown
for almost fifty years. “When the timbre of a moment resounds in a
handful of strokes and a wash of shimmering light,” observed art critic Jan
painting…(the paintings) fill the gallery with an incandescent power.
Arthur Adlmann, “Cohen intuitively knows that
‘balance’ has been achieved. “Finding that balance,” the artist observes,
“is like walking a tightrope.”
Cohen’s gorgeous sweeping panoramas of Provincetown
Harbor are developed from storied layering and scraping - thin levels of
paint built up over a day, week or even over several years, referred to
by Cohen as the “ghost” in his painting. It is
this “buried” sense of time and continuity that evokes a sense of timelessness
and spatial infinity. Working with a focused palette of blues and grays,
occasionally some pink and green, Cohen repeatedly brings the viewer a
synthesis of light from different moments; his landscape paintings possess
an inherent monumentality that is eternally, classically “Provincetown.”
“Cohen
has become one of this country’s noted painters,” wrote Edward Feitt in
“American Artist”. He quotes Cohen as saying, “I haven’t worked out one
technique with which to begin a painting. With each painting, I feel as
though I’ve never learned to paint and must begin all over
again.” He sees technique as necessary and yet
unimportant. “An artist,” Cohen believes, “must know how to use his or
her materials, but craft must be subordinate to feeling. Technique can be
taught,” Cohen concludes, “but I’m not so sure about what it takes to
make a (good) painting.
In
writing about Cohen in The New York Times,
Viven Raynor said: “The mystery (Cohen) addresses is of light and color;
the one he achieves has to do with the spirit of the place he is Cohen is “an
artist’s artist”, as attested to by the numbers of artists who own his
paintings: Red Grooms, Paul Resika, Wolf Kahn, Chaim Gross, Raphael
Soyer, Mary Oliver, Edwin Denby, Michael Mazur, Lise Motherwell, to cite a
few. He studied with Edwin Dickinson at both Cooper Union and the Art
Students League, and also with Robert Gwathmey and Reginald Marsh. He is
included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, Museum of the City of
New York, Brooklyn Museum, New York Historical Society, Boston Museum of Fine
Arts, Hirshhorn Museum, Everson Museum, Cape Cod Museum in Dennis, and
Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Included among the more than
dozen grants and awards he has received, are a Guggenheim in 1981, Pollock
Krasner Award in 1986 & 1993; Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Award in
1987. He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1984, and
selected for the cover art of Mary Oliver’s 1990 book of poems,
“House of Light”.