26 VIEWS OF SANKATY
BY LAURA RASKIN INDEPENDENT ARTS WRITER

Conservation can be memorial as well as literal, the protection of

moment as opposed to place. And then there is conservation in physics, where mass, charge and energy hang tight, irre-spective of internal or external changes.

The artist M.J. Levy Dickson has com-bined aspects of all three for her opening at the Old Spouter Gallery on Friday, Aug. 12.

A founding member of the daring and now extinct (X) Gallery and the artist behind the wildflower drawings in the Nantucket Garden Club’s “Wildflowers of Nantucket,” Dickson’s “26 Views of Sankaty Head Lighthouse” is a lovingly wrought preservation effort of all that the light, safe haven and ’Sconset crest embod-ies, with its seductive red band.

The 1849 lighthouse, once the most powerful light in New England with the installation of a Fresnel lens, is now as endangered as the ships that crept towards the shoals below its bluff.

Indifferent winter storms have eroded the land even further. Although preservation efforts have been ongoing, Dickson fears Sankaty is going over the bluff.

On a walk with her Jack Russell terrier on the first spring day in April, no one crossed Dickson’s path as she attempted a hike on ceding, sloping sand from Hoicks Hollow Road to the ’Sconset post office. Burlap boards used to hold back the bluff had reduced to toothpicks at her feet, she said in an interview over coffee in her studio in Wauwinet.

She decided then to put a watercolor series of surfers (her son being one of them) on hold – surfers, even in the ebb and flow of their popularity, would always be silhouetted against the horizon here. Sankaty might not.

Dickson apologized for the disarray of the attic studio as she climbed the stairs, but it looked no more chaotic than the usual spread necessary for creative people. She admitted later that she is wary of taking guests “into the kitchen” – showing them her work before completion.

Pulling from various corners and piles in the room, Dickson arranged the work that will be part of her show in a circle around her. From midnights to midnights, she observed the lighthouse in hourly increments and produced a work for each, plus a couple more out of experimentation. Some are tra-ditional. A 3’x5’ canvas is travelable, with the light-house against a blue sky that wants to come out. In others, the lighthouse is barely visible. Atiny water-color’s shaft of white, scratched into the fiber, is its only indication.

Following a compelling series of watercolors that Dickson was inspired to do from night scenes of the war in Iraq on the Internet and television, she brought out her night-vision goggles for the Sankaty series. As a result, the lighthouse is black against almost black in one piece, like graphic novelist Art Speigelman’s twin towers for a Sept. 11 New Yorker cover.

Dickson used Sankaty to explore mediums and tools she has not touched in years, like charcoal and palette knives. Recent experimentation, and not an artist’s madness or self-destruction, had her padding woodcuts with towels and driving over them to make prints.

“I’m just nervous enough about my show, maybe I could drive over it,” she said laughing.

She called on her friend and artist David Lazarus, who once shared her studio, to remind her of the basics of printmaking. Both recalled American expressionist Helen Frankenthaler’s woodblock printing with painting over them, of which Dickson is enamored.

“The nice thing about this show for me is it’s exploring, it’s having fun with one object that’s a symbol and getting further and further away from the image,” she said.

Although Dickson and her Squam sketchbook were tapped for a video series about arts and con-servation for Plum TV, she is not an obvious advo-cate of standing in the way of nature’s inherent attri-tion.

“Man’s natural instinct is to control nature,” said Dickson. “We don’t always look at the conse-quences of controlling our environment, and a short-term solution isn’t necessarily beneficial for the long term.”

Pearl restaurant owners Angela and Seth Raynor commissioned Dickson to do a watercolor for their dining room, for which Dickson produced a moon study.

“The painting is very ethereal and it just fills the space. It’s very soft. It works very well in the space,” said Angela Raynor. “Many people have tried to purchase it. I keep telling them no. I can’t imagine parting with it.”

One of Dickson’s longtime Nantucket friends and former ’Sconset neighbor Mimi Young has trav-eled with Dickson to Japan, Thailand and Hong Kong when Young’s son was working in the region.

“It was great for me because I saw things through her artist’s eyes. Her work has that (Eastern) feel,” she said.

Young has many of Dickson’s paintings and said she has to be careful with her praise because she finds the ones she likes on her doorstep as gifts.

Young and Dickson met when Dickson lived next door in ’Sconset. Dickson would sit in an upstairs room feeding her children and look over the sur-rounding rooftops. Young’s first painting of Dickson’s is one of her own roofline and chimney.

Dickson’s opening at the Old Spouter Gallery, 118 Orange St., is Friday, Aug. 12, from 6 to 8 p.m.

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