Summer Solos, Part 3: Helen Miranda Wilson

Summer Solos, Part 1: Brenda Goodman   

Summer Solos, Part 2: Debra Ramsay

The Albert Merola Gallery is a lovely small space in Provincetown’s East End, perfect for showing small (and sometimes not so small) work. The tiny back gallery was the perfect setting—intimate and quiet—for Helen Miranda Wilson’s modestly scaled gouaches in an exhibition titled Wavy, Wiggly Ones. 

Still life with painting and postcard

Mexicana, 2011, gouache on paper, 8 x 7 inches

After painting landscapes and other images of the natural world for some years, Wilson turned to abstraction about a decade ago. Her paintings are nevertheless teeming with allusions to and invocations of the rhythms, vibrations and cycles of an observed environment. (A Cape Cod native, she keeps bees, and as a member of her town’s Shellfish Advisory Board is keenly aware of coastal life and cycles.)

Panorama of three walls

Click image for a larger view

I’m smitten with Wilson’s color, rendered fluid and rich in gouache. I’m posting this report to follow the one on Debra Ramsay. While both artists make work about what they observe in nature, the results are quite different; however the range and depth of their observation—and indeed, their palette—would appear to share common roots.

 Raga, 2009, gouache on paper, 8 x 10 inches sans frame

This and the following images from the gallery's website 

Temple Way, 2009, gouache on paper, 6.5 x 8 inches

Sargasso Sea, 2011, gouache on paper, 8 x 10 inches

I've written about Wilson's work before, which you can read here, here and here