Richard Pasquarelli Beach Town Memorail Day-Labor Day 2006 Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center Gallery
Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center Gallery is proud to present Beach Townby artist Richard Pasquarelli. His intriguing new series of large-sized watercolors will be on view beginning Memorial Day Weekend and running through August 31st.
Welcome to Beach Town: a fictional place created from the combination of three northeast beach environs; The Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard and the Jersey Shore. Each image gives the viewer a glimpse into a day in this invented town. The images stand alone, yet when viewed as a whole each becomes a participant in a subtle allegory and takes on an ambiguous new meaning.
Beach Town: a fictional place created from the combination of three northeast beach environs; The Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard and the Jersey Shore.
A place both real and imaged digging into others sandy beaches emerging with a composite of loneliness and uncertainty. yet still a place of imagined safety. translucent and opaque
These works use a traditionally soft medium in a way that freshly cuts and redefines the images.
— comment by rick levinson, artist.
Pasquarelli chose to use watercolor for this series because of its often cliche association with the beach town experience; pretty images of beach scapes, still lifes of shells and driftwood and local town scenes. Drawing from those associations but departing from them, Pasquarelli uses the medium in an unexpected way, both in subject matter and technique. By using flat solid colors, not bleeding into one another, the works easily break from the traditional use of watercolor.
Pasquarelli and his family are regular visitors to Westhampton Beach – and to the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center - for which the nine pieces were specifically painted. This series of watercolors include familiar sites such as the Beach Lane Bridge and the landmark Foster Crampton Cottage on Dune Road, as well as images from Pasquarelli's travels in communities along the Jersey Shore and Cape Cod. With camera in hand, the artist captures images and then transforms them into allegorical paintings, with his signature quality of darkness shaded with a glint of mystery.
Call the Box office at (631) 288-1500, stop by 76 Main Street, Westhampton Beach from Wednesday to Sunday between 12 Noon and 6 P.M., or go online to www.WHBPAC.org, for more information.