Gloucester’s weekly summer “Culture Splash” begins this week, on Thursday, celebrating Gloucester’s two formally designated cultural districts of the Rocky Neck Art Colony and West Main Street.
The Jane Deering Gallery has announced an opening to coincide with the first Culture Splash, a solo art exhibit of Vincent Castagnacci. The opening reception will be Thursday, July 11 at the Jane Deering Gallery on Pleasant Street, starting at 5 p.m. with pianist / composer / arranger Matt Jenson performing.
“Vincent Castagnacci | Variations on the Rock that is Cape Ann” stretches back to the artist’s work starting in 1978 when Castagnacci began painting Cape Ann. Opening the show is a small Study for Cape Ann in which striking forms establish the artist’s insistence on rendering memory in personal terms.
The exhibition runs through July 28th.
Castagnacci’s profound familiarity with the geometry of the Cape is everywhere — in the wedge of Folly Cove, the columnar slabs of Halibut Point, the trapezoidal rhythms of the Quarries, the horizontal striations of color and texture in water and stone. These features are the motivating factors underlying his work.
“Everything is based on what I have seen, and then I work that out in abstraction,” said the artist.
Vincent Castagnacci was born in Providence, Rhode Island and is a painter with studios in Pinckney, Michigan and earlier in Gloucester. From 1959 to 1962 he studied drawing, painting, printmaking at the Boston Museum School and drawing and sculpture with George Demetrios in Boston and Gloucester. The Museum School degree program with Tufts University awarded him a BS Ed in 1963. He received a BFA from Yale University in 1964 and continued on at Yale to receive his MFA in 1966. He joined the University of Michigan faculty in 1973.
Castagnacci has received numerous grants and fellowships from Michigan and other funding sources. In 1980 he was awarded a citation and grant from the American Academy in Rome where he was visiting artist for nine months. In 1999 he was named Arthur F. Thurnau Distinguished Professor of Fine Arts, one of the highest honors awarded to University of Michigan teaching faculty. He also was a Mellon Scholar at Kalamazoo College.
Jane Deering Gallery
Fri & Sat, 1 to 5pm; Sun 1 to 4pm; and by appointment
