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Provincetown Independent | BEACH / HOUSE | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong>2024</strong> | 21 The Art of Blanche Lazzell’s Flowers One of Provincetown’s founding art colony painters fed both her spirit and her creativity in a tiny studio garden at the end of a rickety East End wharf By Stephen Orr “T he gaiety and brilliancy of the flowers surrounding the studio of Blanche Lazzell attract and hold our attention whether we glimpse it from the waterside or through its narrow approach down an unnamed alley. Gay as these surroundings are they find a rival in the fascinating interior of this former fish house, now one of the more attractive spots in Provincetown. It is here that more than a thousand visitors have this summer seen Miss Lazzell’s work: an exhibition of wood block prints, which would draw attention anywhere and in this town with its variety of production stands distinctive by reason of its honest strength and genuine character.” ‘Care and proper soil make flowers almost talk. Mine have expression. They express God — if given the chance.’ — Lazzell in a letter to her sister, April 27, 1937 Clockwise from top: Blanche Lazzell waters the container garden at her East End pier studio in a 1942 photograph. (Photo West Virginia and Regional History Center) Always a master of economy, Lazzell tends the fishing nets she used as trellises in a photo from 1951. (Photo West Virginia and Regional History Center) Cubist abstractions inside her studio. (Photo courtesy Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.) The artist paints surrounded by petunias on her studio porch c. 1932 and sports the swim attire of the day, c. 1920. (Photos West Virginia and Regional History Center) A Lazzell white-line print created for the WPA that features her studio pier, 1937. (Photo courtesy Library of Congress) So reported the Provincetown Advocate in 1940. For much of the artist Blanche Lazzell’s life, Provincetown was her happy place, and, tucked within it, an even happier spot, her bayside studio garden of boldly colored annuals. There, in a former storage shack that had housed fishing supplies, she was her most creative and productive. She began painting, printmaking, hooking rugs, and decorating porcelain pieces as soon as she arrived in town in 1915 to study with Charles Hawthorne. “The sea is wonderful to paint,” she wrote to her sister in that first year. “But don’t think or let anyone think I am here on a pleasure trip. I am getting pleasure out of very hard work. I am getting very encouraging criticisms. Mr. Hawthorne says, ‘go right on painting that way.’ ” Despite her somewhat conservative nature and upper-middle-class upbringing in the coal country of West Virginia where she was born in 1878, Lazzell was very independent for the time, and as an early cubist, drawn to the new and novel in art. She studied with Fernand Léger and others at the Académie Moderne in Paris, making new American friends there who enticed her to settle afterwards in the new Cape Cod art colony. Frequent letters to her sisters reveal a woman who relished a sense of freedom she found on the Outer Cape. The other, near constant topic in her letters was her studio flower garden, especially her petunias, which she doted on as if they were beloved pets. “It is a beautiful day,” she reported to her sister in 1932. “We had a hard rain and storm last Friday. It melted every petunia blossom, but they are out again now…. It spoiled the marigolds. I still have snapdragons. The garden has been heavenly this summer. The petunias seem to be so human.” Lazzell was from a family of means but she had to live frugally on a small stipend most of her life. So, hers was a garden of economy: salvaged wooden containers, barrels, and lard tubs, all swathed in string fishing nets that hid her homespun construction techniques while providing maritime-themed trellising for morning glories and vining petunias, which she reported to her sister reached six feet tall. In 1927, she wrote to her niece, Frances Reed, “I am now waiting for Mr. Atkins the plumber to come to fix a water line & faucet in the garden — going to have it piped around the chimney. And when I get my next check, I’ll order a soft hose. My continued on page 22
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