Albaugh's frontiers of isolation at Spouter
BY MARLI GUZZETTA INDEPENDENT ARTS EDITOR
When Old Spouter artist Joan Albaugh first began painting, her eyes and hands focused on the houses printed neatly along the horizon like a complete sentence, with the atmosphere around them equating to the page on which the words were written.

Two of Albaugh's untitled works; her exhibit opens at Old Spouter this Friday.

"But as the years have gone on, the landscape has become more prominent and structures have become secondary to me," said Albaugh, whose exhibit goes up at the Old Spouter Gallery this week.

Topped with gables and iceberg tips that reach up to the sun, the show highlights homes and icebergs, which loom with muted exteriors. The houses, for example, have no windows or doors. Instead of speaking for themselves, they reflect the song of the natural landscape - and in this sense, they have taken on attributes of their creator.

"Wherever I travel, I take pictures," said Albaugh, who recently took a longdesired trip to Greenland. "[I] felt kind of like a frontiersmen," she marveled. "Like this is the last frontier, and I was on it."

IMAGES COURTESY OLD SPOUTER

It might seem unusual that an artist would pair homes with icebergs; however their conglomeration is the product of more than just the timing of a cruise. With a Hopper-ian simplicity, the homes in Albaugh's landscapes have always stalked the horizon with massive authority and linear angles, sometimes indistinct from the landscape surrounding them. They are studies in images that are "isolated from their surroundings," Albaugh said.

Her images have a sense of isolation that may or may not also be loneliness.

"I'm really drawn to big-outdoors, Ansel-Adams kind of photography and Rockwell Kent's work," she said. "As an artist, you spend so much time with yourself."

In these isolated moments, the exterior plane inspires the artist, who then manifests a kind of interior snapshot of what she sees, according to Albaugh.

"I don't paint windows, because I don't need to see them," said Albaugh, who is most interested in how the strong light of Nantucket's late day "can zing a house."

"The windows just distract what the story is about for me," said Albaugh. "With every artist, everything you write and paint is about who you are. … Anything you do is a type of self portrait."

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When: Opens Friday, Aug. 3, with a reception from 6 - 8 p.m.

Where: Old Spouter Gallery, 118 Orange Street

For more information, please call 325-9988.