High Noon

[Zdenko]

Artists and photographers of all stripes are attracted to Cape Cod because of the famous Cape light, a trick of the moisture in the air mixing with the reflections of sun, cloud and fog off the ocean to create a particular soft light. But every artist has a different way of handling that light.
Herb Edwards
Herb Edwards paints in the open air.

Traditionally, artists like to head out early in the morning, often quitting by 10 a.m. or not beginning until 4 p.m. But plein air oil painter Herb Edwards take a different approach. He likes to go out at about 11 a.m. and paint right through the noon hour until about 2 p.m., when the sun is at its brightest and shadows are almost non-existent.

“I like the bleached-out high sun,” Edwards says. “The Cape light does affect you when you’re out there, there’s no doubt about it.” The light is particularly intense on the Lower Cape where the water lies on three sides.

A painting such as Edwards’s “Chatham Mailboxes” shows strong geometry in the diagonals of a cottage’s roof, the verticals of the mailbox posts and telephone poles, and the horizontals of the cottage’s windows and, of course, the horizon itself. Although the light is very bright under a blue sky, the telephone poles cast diagonal shadows over the grass, a bulkhead and a shrub.

Another painting, “Morning Bridge Street,” is marked by dabs of bright color, as in the red stop sign on the gate that closes across the bridge. A third painting, “Chatham Bars,” shows the view from somewhere on Shore Road across to North Beach. Edwards’ paintings are beautiful, colorful, and full of life.

Edwards spends three hours outdoors on a painting, and then refines it in his studio. Many plein air painters completely finish the painting while out in the field. Is Edwards’ method a tricky one?

“Oils’ll dry, but you can paint over oils,” he says. “I’ve been doing it a long time.”

He describes his own style as “painterly realism. I like to work from subjects but I’m not a super realist. I interpret through the medium of paint.”

Edwards is married to the painter Lillia Frantin who exhibits in a gallery in New York City. They are the parents of a son, Joel, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. Does the talent for painting run in families? Judging by the Edwards family, it would seem so. Joel Edwards is also a painter, currently trying to break into the New York galleries.

The couple has lived full-time in a 200-year old farmhouse in North Falmouth since 1996, after visiting the Cape for many summers. For 20 years Edwards was a professor of fine arts at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, N.J. While still living in New Jersey, during the winters Edwards would paint in his studio from photographs or drawings. Then, “I would do paintings and bring them up to the Munson Gallery and drop them off in the early summer.”

Edwards likes to paint all over Cape Cod, but he particularly likes to paint the Chatham Shore off Shore Road. Another favorite spot is Bridge Street, near the bridge. “There are different little nooks and crannies that I find around,” he adds. He’ll arrive in Chatham at about 11 a.m. and “just sort of drive around. Maybe I’ll see a boat out in the water, see something that attracts my attention.”

Edwards, 67, grew up in the coal mining country of Western Pennsylvania, and graduated with a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of New Mexico in 1963. He continued his art education at the Pratt Institute, graduating with a masters in fine arts in 1970. Since then he has taught art workshops around the country.

After retiring from full-time teaching in 1989, Edwards returned to Northern New Mexico to live in a small artist community and paint the desert landscape. It is possible that the “stark light” of New Mexico, with its “very strong shapes,” has influenced what he looks for in the Cape light.

In seeking subjects for his plein air paintings, Edwards ventures to Northern New England and to France, Italy and Dalmatia.

He admires the Impressionists, and the post-Impressionists, particularly Cezanne, Van Gogh and Munch. He also cites the modern New England painters Fairfield Porter and Milton Avery as influences.

Edwards’s paintings have been collected by museums and institutions as diverse as the Cape Cod Museum in Dennis and the American Embassy in New Guinea. He has exhibited his work in major galleries and museums on the East and West coasts. In 2005 he won an award for Best Oil Paining during the “Juried Summer Annual” put on by the Falmouth Artists Guild.

A show of Edwards’s paintings called “New Paintings,” has been on display at the Munson Gallery for the past several weeks, and it closed June 28. After that, his paintings will remain on display in the gallery through the summer.

[Croatia luxury]

Croatian and Bosnian paleontologists have discovered remains of an extinct leopard species in a cave in Bosnia.

A group of paleontologists from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, led by Kazimir Miculinic from Zagreb, released the results of their latest three-day research in Vjetrenica cave near Stolac in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where they had discovered skeletons of two leopards and a bear. They estimate that the remains could be as many as several thousand years old.

"The remains of the two leopards are skeletons of the leopard species that lived in the area between Spain and South Africa, [a species] that became completely extinct in the Balkans, which is to say European area several thousand years ago," said research coordinator Ivo Lucic.

Experts say that the existence of a whole skeleton of the leopard species that became extinct in Europe was discovered in the cave back in 1968 and they are now trying to pull it out.

Other than in Vjetrenica, parts of the skeleton of the extinct European leopard have already been dicovered in the cave Pisana Stina in Dalmatia, in Veternica near Zagreb, Velika Pecina cave on Ravna Gora highland, and in a cave in Montenegro.

The bear skeleton in Vjetrenica is estimated to be up to five thousand years old. It most likely belongs to a cave bear species that is also extinct in Europe.

Very nice to see! The Artists From Cape Cod