The northeast seacoast is a powerful subject. It is both monumental and intimate. Patrick Healey's pure images of sea-meditations convey the bleaching intensity of light on the ocean and shoreline in a manner that clearly presents this paradox. Healey's horizon lines stress the plain geometry of the sky over a calm sea with cottages as spatial markers. The result is a minimal landscape, usually wide and low. Space and interval are used with the utmost deliberation, and each element achieves perfect pitch. Healey's work speaks to the quiet awe to boundless space. The Isles of Shoals Series presents Patrick Healey's most recent paintings. The stillness of the water in windless air and self-effacing beauty of the cottages are Healey's means of exploring exquisite nuances of light and atmosphere.

Looking Out, 2000 Oil on linen, 15" x 42"

The artist's sensitivity to the mood of climate, light, and place are rooted in the cultural history of the Isles of Shoals as well as its physicality. The Shoals is a small group of islands off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine, about ten miles from Portsmouth Harbor. The early inhabitants of the Shoals gave some of the islands earthy, descriptive names: Star, Hog, and Duck Island. Others were named after people and places: White, Seavey, Lunging (London), and Malaga. In the nineteenth century, several grand hotels were built on Appledore, Smuttynose, and Star Islands. This was home for Celia Thaxter, who was one of the nineteenth century's most renowned American poets. Thaxter established the Isles of Shoals as a musicians and artists colony that attracted well-known visitors. Among those drawn to the beauty of the area were Harriet Beecher Stowe, Richard Henry Dana, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Childe Hassam. Healey enters this world along a parallel plane. He bridges both a literary and artistic heritage through a poetry of light.

Most viewers experience the Isles of Shoals from a distance at sea or from the shore. Healey reverses that position and places the viewer on an island surrounded by equivalent densities of water and sky. To reinforce this reversal of reference, it is the sea which appears dense and the land which suggests openness.

Healey chooses a high horizon line in Looking Out (2000) and divides the composition into three horizontal bands. Outright description is removed in order to present his subject as an abstract entity. The individual elements of cottage and roof serve as elements in a larger scheme. The structures are unencumbered by distracting detail. Colors are limited in order to concentrate on relations of scale, density, texture, and the expression of coherence among them. The lemon-yellow foreground abuts the cool blue of the sea. There is a "call and response" between the white strip separating land and sea and its answering echo between the sea and sky.

A highly saturated violet blue rectangle dominates Sun Over Water (2001). A light blue band hovers above the horizon line. A deepening of the highest stria of color presses down on the composition. The yellow of wispy clouds shows itself again in the cottage in the lower part of the painting. Interest and formal control are provided by way of warm yellows playing off cool blues. Healey's cottages are irregular and deliberately misalligned with the horizon. The structures hover between the descriptive and the abstract, between the natural and the geometric.

Offshore, 1997 Oil on linen, 20" x 60"

Offshore (1997) depicts two cottages at opposite ends of the canvas, both facing an expanse of ocean. According to Healey, the painting was originally titled Relationship. He says, "I saw two individuals in a relationship seemingly apart, but together in the greater sense as they faced the same world." A physical separation between the structures suggests emotional distance. Here, he offers a slice of life, a moment in a narrative that is left unresolved.

Vessel, 2001 Oil on linen, 16" x 44"

Colors appear to seep from the weave of Healey's canvas, as though the color was dyed into it. The blazing red and yellow-orange boat of Vessel (2001) is in charged contrast to the painting's deep blues. The boat seems to be gravity-free. Great bands of color stretch across Hope and Possibility (2001). Bold strokes run from side to side across the canvas. Bands of color, applied with a palette knife, assert the flatness of the land, water, clouds, and sky. Peach hovers above a bleached gray line, forcing the viewer to focus on the horizon. However, his strong colors maintain a lively tension between the painting's two-dimensional abstract properties and its illusion of three-dimensional space.

In the Isles of Shoals Series, Patrick Healey explores his deep feeling for the linear and for the wholeness of objects that are not allowed to lose their tactile identity. His penchant for the clean line and the actuality of objects is often balanced by dazzling light emanating from a distant core, enveloping detail in atmosphere. Healey's work is an exploration of the parallel worlds of land and sea, of reason and faith.

Rosemary Noon
Director
Fine Arts Center

Exhibition History:

Patrick Healey has had numerous solo exhibitions including those held in the following locations: Mclane, Graf Ralerson & Middleton, Portsmouth, NH (2001 and 2000); Strawberry Banke Museum, Portsmouth, NH (1999); Whistler House Museum of Art, Lowell, MA (1997); The Eliot Gallery, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (1997). Additional solo exhibitions include: "Outside the Walls," outdoor installation, The Art Insitute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (1996); "Beached Art," Provincetown, MA (1996); "Lowell Revisited," Mogan Cultural Center, Lowell, MA (1996); and "Ten Year Retrospective," Time Life Building, Chicago, IL (1994).

Among the group exhibitions in which his art has been shown are: "Labor History," Mogan Cultural Center, Lowell, MA (1989); "Lives of a River," Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA (1988); and "Gloria Wilcher Memorial Exhibition," Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH.

Patrick Healey lives and works in Portsmouth, NH.

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