Light sails, warm colors
Island artist Lou Guarnaccia creates sailboats that catch light instead of wind
By Marli Guzzetta + Independent Arts Editor
It's as though Nantucket caught nautical and landscape artist Lou Guarnaccia as if he were a fish. Sailing to Greenwich to Maine in a 40-foot classic sailboat, Guarnaccia and his shipmates had to waylay their trip on Nantucket after a bluefish spit a hook into the face of a crew member. The accident reeled the boat to the island, to Cottage Hospital, and Lou Guarnaccia was smitten.

Above: Guarnaccia at work on "Nantucket Race Day" in his studio.

"I was holding my shipmate's hand in the ambulance, and on the way up Main Street, I said to her, 'This is where I'm supposed to be,'" remembered Guarnaccia (who added that his shipmate was spotless in three days). "I felt the energy here immediately and still do."

A frequent sailor, he returned to Nantucket seasonally for years before he and his wife, Kim, decided to make a year-round go of it here. After running an advertising agency on island, Guarnaccia has been painting full-time since 2000. His work is represented by nine galleries. Today, he and Kim share a Surfside home with a sailboat in the driveway and a lush garden and a small art studio in the backyard, where Guarnaccia, in prepping the ground for the studio, dug into the skeleton of a horse buried with its head facing due north. He subsequently named it the "Dead Horse Studio." Inside, a homemade media rack is ribbed with titles from Bob Dylan, Crosby, Stills & Nash and R.E.M.

"TWILIGHT IN NANTUCKET HARBOR"

In Dead Horse this week, Guarnaccia is trimming the sails on his latest works, which will go up at Cavalier Galleries this Thursday.

In this series, the buildings, sails, seas and beaches are swathed in horizontal sunbeams. His subjects are embarking on the journeys of their days (walking the dogs down Main Street at sunrise in "Main Street at 6 a.m.") or ending them (arriving back in Nantucket harbor at dusk after a sail in "Twilight in Nantucket Harbor").

Guarnaccia is painting the times of day when people are looking forward or backward: dawn and dusk, which represent our daily rhythms of hope and nostalgia. "If you're taking a boat trip to Hyannis, when you're leaving the harbor, you see a lot of movement. But the more you get out into the sound, it dissipates, and then there's nothing for a while. Then you get back to Hyannis, and there's movement," said Guarnaccia, comparing the parts of a nautical trip to the day itself. "You start the morning with much more energy. Then, during our day, the time is much more open before returning at the end."

"MAIN STREET AT 6 A.M."

Though most people associate Guarnaccia with landscapes and ships, the real subject of his paintings is light - specifically the light at dawn and at dusk in this series.

"For me, it's all about the light," Guarnaccia said. "When I pick a particular place to paint, I need to have an initial spark. The moment when I think 'Oh my, God. I gotta get that.'"

Guarnaccia believes he uses light in a way that is unique on Nantucket. "I don't think anyone on island is doing what I'm doing with light and color. It's not just a values scale of 1 - 10, but also the intensity of light. If I use a warm light, then I use a cool shadow with the application of paint. The lighter the light, the thicker the paint, the slower the brush stroke," said Guarnaccia, as he shone a warm, overhead light on a painting of a nautical race. The sails in the painting filled with a warm, sunny light, instead of a wind - and the picture seemed to glow. "The darker the dark, the thinner the paint, the faster the brush stroke."

"THE FIRST GUN"

Typically, Guarnaccia has done most of his light studies in New Hampshire, where he and his wife abscond to a remote cottage in the mountains for a few months each year. "I learn a lot about light painting landscapes there, and bring it here and apply it to boats, and what I learn working on the boats, I take to New Hampshire," said Guarnaccia of his artistic crop rotation.

But this summer, he's spent a bit more time with his feet on dry land here, working on landscapes to prepare himself for the book on Nantucket landmarks, including Main Street, the Old Mill, the moors, the dunes and a

few winter scenes.

In Guarnaccia's landscapes, vast expanses surround the people inside the paintings, who aren't rendered any larger than one's thumb, giving the scenes a touch of the sublime. His new piece "The Dunes at Miacomet" is a good example of this.

"LAST LIGHT AT BRANT POINT"

Guarnaccia doesn't paint plein air - "I don't like painting where people can watch me" - so he normally begins the process by making sketches on site in oil, watercolor or even in pencil with notes on the color. He'll also take a digital shot with the camera to "create memory triggers." ("I'm not painting from a photo," he said.)

Because of the "tremendous amount of work" he's done in his light studies, Guarnaccia says, he's perfectly comfortable painting lightscapes from Dead Horse.

He begins painting with a toned canvas, on which he draws accurate but not detailed shapes with his brush. From there, he uses two-inch brushes to create an abstract painting, whose colors, shapes and values are accurate. "I call it a very aggressive block-in, and it's done fast," said Guarnaccia, who added that some patrons who've seen this process encourage him to stop at this stage.

"STARTING TO BLOW"

"Abstraction has its place in my work, but I want to go deeper," Guarnaccia said of his own desire to paint representational or realist images, which he's been doing since he was 8 years old. As a young man, he trained under Stanley Stephanowitz and Frank Novak at Norwich Art School/Slater Museum before attending Paier School of Art in Hamden, Conn., where he studied under Dean Keller, Ken Davies and Rudolph Zallinger. In later years, he took a 10- year hiatus from realism to paint only in the abstract, and though it didn't suit him to paint abstract in the long run, it did "catapault" his representational work. "Because all of a sudden, I had uninhibited technique," Guarnaccia said.

One of the benefits of painting realistically is that Guarnaccia can render ships that are anatomically correct - trimmed to be seaworthy.

"I know how the boat should be trimmed for the weather," said the sailor, who includes himself in a sailboat in every nautical painting he completes. He said he does it as a wink to viewers - enticing them to find him in a "Where's Waldo?" kind of way. But it also seems, for the man who thinks through every gust of wind and taut sail in his paintings, that including himself in the painting is a kind of emotional realism. He's putting himself on that boat to feel the scene before he puts it down on canvas.

"I've been painting for so long, I don't paint what I think," Guarnaccia

said. "I paint what I feel." I

When: Thurs., June 21 -

Thurs., June 28

Where: Cavalier Galleries,

34 Main Street

For more information,

please call 325-4405.