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Beach House, Spring 2024

This special issue of the Provincetown Independent nudges us into spring on Outer Cape Cod — into the landscape of beach plums and bees; into ceramicists' studios and artists' interiors and gardens; and off on a quest for beach houses where sun and wind inform design.

This special issue of the Provincetown Independent nudges us into spring on Outer Cape Cod — into the landscape of beach plums and bees; into ceramicists' studios and artists' interiors and gardens; and off on a quest for beach houses where sun and wind inform design.

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Provincetown Independent | BEACH / HOUSE | <strong>Spring</strong> <strong>2024</strong> | 7<br />

Interior Landscapes in Dialogue<br />

With Light<br />

For observational artists, the idea of turning one’s attention<br />

to the indoors might seem counterintuitive in a place like<br />

Cape Cod. But for a few, domestic landscapes still inspire.<br />

By Abraham Storer<br />

Love Shack II by Karen Cappotto. (Photo courtesy Karen Cappotto)<br />

KAREN CAPPOTTO has found herself recently fascinated<br />

with the interiors of quintessential Provincetown structures,<br />

including the dune shacks and the Mary Heaton Vorse house. She<br />

made one of her first interior paintings nearly 10 years ago after<br />

helping a friend move out of a summer cottage on Creek Road. “It<br />

was one of those moments where I knew my experience in Provincetown<br />

would change,” she says. “I knew our bohemian lifestyle<br />

was forever gone.” She memorialized the experience in a 17-foot<br />

painting. In Bath Time, a more recent painting of one of the improvisational<br />

homes on Tasha Hill, she strikes a tone that is both elegiac<br />

and matter of fact in its bare-bones depiction of a bathroom<br />

with funky windows. “I’m focused on places that I feel are precariously<br />

close to not being around for very long,” Cappotto says.<br />

Bath Time by Karen Cappotto. (Photo courtesy Karen Cappotto)<br />

BOB HENRY paints all sorts of things but periodically<br />

he sets up his easel and paints the rooms<br />

he lives in. In these paintings, a few of which are<br />

currently on view at Wellfleet Preservation Hall, he<br />

explores the dialogue between an inner space and<br />

the outside. Often the landscape of Wellfleet’s Duck<br />

Creek peeks through the windows in his interior<br />

paintings.<br />

In Wellfleet, Third Floor he makes a painting of<br />

his sitting room, but the real subject here is light<br />

breaking through the stormy clouds outside the<br />

window and filtering through the room, illuminating<br />

ledges and table tops and bouncing across the<br />

walls. The burdensome and banal objects of daily<br />

life — a pile of papers, a shopping bag, old chairs —<br />

are heightened by the transformative experience of<br />

light and color.<br />

continued on page 9<br />

Wellfleet, Third Floor, oil on canvas by Bob Henry. (Photo by Abraham Storer)

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