CITY LIFE. The collection in this Boston home reflects the feel of the city through urban landscapes and painterly compositions.

Transcription

1 1 CITY LIFE The collection in this Boston home reflects the feel of the city through urban landscapes and painterly compositions. BY JOHN O HERN PHOTOGRAPHY BY FRANCIS SMITH 040

2 1 To the left in the entry is Gregory Prestegord s Garden & Revere, oil on panel To the right of the mirror are three paintings by Nadée: Women & Poet, Stories 30 and Delicate Feeling. 2 To the left on the landing is Mary Sauer s Gray Afternoon, 2016, oil on canvas. On the far wall of the dining room is Jussi Pöyhönen s The Morikami Japanese Gardens, 2009, oil on linen. 041

3 1 ur collectors met in college and after 25 years O in Greenwich, Connecticut, moved to Boston s Back Bay a year and a half ago. She grew up with a designer mother and a father who collected fine Chinese porcelain. I was an art history major for a short time in college until my father convinced me to switch to economics, she says. But I did have an unofficial minor in art history. Her deliberate business mind gives way to a more immediate emotional and visceral response to art. If I see something, I know right away if I love it. She recounts walking along nearby Newbury Street, famed for its galleries, and looking up at Newbury Fine Arts many of the galleries on Newbury Street are above street level. I saw Jean Richardson s Rubicund in the window and loved it. I went up the stairs and bought it. Walking along Charles Street, she happened into Ali Ringenburg s Sloane Merrill Gallery where she fell in love with the painterly urban scenes of Gregory Prestegord. I went to a ton of galleries, she recounts, and I grew to trust Ali s judgment. She ll bring me things she knows I ll like, and she knows when to push me. She helps me get things reframed I like Stanhope Framers out on Marlborough Street. She knows just what a painting needs. She s also here when paintings are being hung and knows what should go where. Ringenburg comments that her clients have a partnership in their collecting, each seeing different things and each often convincing the other. The collector recounts, I can be difficult, but she was persuaded by her mother, who is the couple s interior designer, and her husband to buy a large vintage poster at a Brookline print shop. It would never have gone in our Greenwich home, she explains. It was a large very traditional home with traditional art and furniture. I wanted something different in Boston. I wanted traditional here, but I wanted it to be a little more creative, a little more open. I wanted it to feel like Boston. She is attracted to color and recalls loving impressionism when she was in college. There were few figures in the paintings they collected earlier, but now people have begun to appear. The majority of the paintings are lushly painted, urban landscapes. Prestegord s gritty scenes are produced primarily with a palette knife. The artist says, The more layers you paint, the more it resonates. I m 1 Gregory Prestegord s Night Streets, Boston, 2014, oil on panel, hangs in the entry. 2 On the stair landing to the left is Gregory Prestegord s Stock Exchange, 2013, oil on panel. In the foreground is Horseback Ride, a charcoal by Olivier Suire Verley. 3 A painting from a roof deck hangs at the landing of the stairs to the couple s own roof deck. 4 A collection of etchings and a conté drawing hang to the left in the living room. To the left of the door is Maggie Siner s Pears & Eggplant, 2006, oil on linen. Through the doorway is Mary Sauer s Gray Afternoon, 2016, oil on canvas

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5 5 trying to show what s going on in our current environment. I think every artist would try to capture the moment they lived in. Ringenburg sent over an image of a painting by Mary Sauer she thought the collector would like. I loved it within a minute, she admits. Her husband and Ringenburg moved the painting around until all three agreed they d found the perfect spot. Sauer is another painterly painter although her work is tighter than most of the other works in the collection. My goal is to bridge the gap between conceptual art and classically trained figurative paintings, she writes, and to create pieces that use beauty, technical mastery and a timeless subject matter to convey a symbolic narrative that becomes a visual manifestation of the internal psychological space where perfectionism lives. The collector brought home a painting by Andrew Fish and her husband was skeptical at first. Now he is a fan. Fish is another painter of colorful, light-animated city scenes. Like other painters in the collection, he pushes the boundaries of traditional painting. He says, As a painter, I explore human expression and digital technology in contemporary life. The act of making pictures has become ubiquitous; my work examines what this means for individuals and what it means to create an image today. There is a consistency to the collection in the 5 To the left in the family room is Ben Shattuck s The Collector, 2016, oil on panel. Three oils by Eric Emile Walker hang above the side table: top left, The Crossing II, 2012; beneath it, After the Rain, 2014; and to the right, Bright Lights, A vintage French poster hangs above the sofa. 6 Andrew Fish s Interior Monologue, 2015, oil on linen, is to the right of the doorway in the living room. Jean Richardson s Rubicund is above the sofa. 7 In the guest bedroom is a landscape by Cleber Stecei

6 6 7 theme of city paintings and the artists joy in manipulating the physical qualities of paint, not necessarily striving for verisimilitude. The couple is completing a home on Cape Cod and often visit Addison Art Gallery in Orleans, Massachusetts. Helen Addison specializes in Cape scenes although her artists are from around the world. I probably went into 10 galleries on the Cape but kept going back to Helen s. I found three urban paintings there by Eric Emile Walker. Helen said, I never have urban paintings and you found them! We ll be looking for Cape art for our home there when it s finished. The collectors have changed over the years from their formal home in Greenwich to their more open and eclectic home in Boston. The home on the Cape will reflect its location and be more Capey than their city house. The collector s father visited their new Boston home and remarked It s so warm. It s you. I love the eclectic feel. She adds, We love coming home. John O Hern, who has retired after 30 years in the museum business, specifically as the Executive Director and Curator of the Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, N.Y., is the originator of the internationally acclaimed Re-presenting Representation exhibitions which promote realism in its many guises. John was chair of the Artists Panel of the New York State Council on the Arts. He writes for gallery publications around the world, including regular monthly features on Art Market Insights and on Sculpture in Western Art Collector magazine. COLLECTOR HOME 045