Memories of a Nantucket childhood
Hoorn-Ashby basks in Maud Bryt's portraits of island summers
BY MARLI GUZZETTA INDEPENDENT ARTS EDITOR
In her career as a photographer and artist, Maud Bryt has made a lifelong study of the clean lines and bold colors of New England Americana.

Maud Bryt's "Picnic at Brant Point 1972."(48x60 inches.) Her exhibit is comprised of images of bygone Nantucket summers with family.

Bryt's love of clean-cut optimism is evident in the series of covers she photographed for J. Crew, and she translates that optimism with oil into a series of paintings on exhibit at the Hoorn-Ashby gallery this week.

"Open Memory: Nantucket" features a series of photos from family summers at Wauwinet from the 1960s through the 1980s. "Sand and salt, dirt roads, dunes, and family. Pajama walks at sunset, picnics at Brant Point, waves to make your heart race, rainy days in the cottage, flashlight tag barefoot at night with all the kids in Wauwinet - this is the Nantucket I remember," Bryt wrote in her artist's statement. "The light, the colors, the textures and even the sound of that time and place are what I'm getting at with these paintings, what I'm reaching back to see and feel."

"Mom Swimming in the Bay, from Dad's Film, 1967." (Each 30 x 36 inches)

Bryt has re-created moments from her past with the same sort of blurring of photographic images employed by artist Gerhard Richter and to the same effect - life is tinted with the haze of memory, creating a nostalgic perspective of picnics at the beach, or young girls dressed for their summer jobs as chambermaids.

In a series of paintings entitled "Mom Swimming in the Bay, from Dad's Film 1967," Bryt depicted a sequence of consecutive moments that place the subject in a lively context, like the photographs of JoAnn Verburg.

A trip to Nantucket as an adult made her long for the simplicity of youthful vision.

"I came here five years ago when my older sister got married, and everything looked so different from when we were kids. It got me looking back at the photos," said Bryt, who treats the Nantucket landscape with a Hopper-ian simplicity that underscores the simplicity of the time for its subject.

"To a visitor, Nantucket is a place apart. ... I look at the photos and simplify them, and bring out what I think is interesting. I abstract them a bit."

Descended from several generations of midwives in Holland, Bryt published "Baby Love: A Tradition of Calm Parenting" - a parenting guidebook that stressed, through images of sated babies, tranquility. Though in a different form, this youthful tranquility, a simple wholesomeness, is rekindled in her Nantucket exhibit.

"I'm here now with my kids, and nothing has changed," Bryt said. "There's still a timelessness."

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When: Opening reception, Friday, Aug. 10, 6 - 8 p.m.; exhibit up through Aug. 17

Where: Hoorn-Ashby, 10 Federal St.
Cost: Free.
For more information, please call 228-9314.

IMAGES COURTESY MAUDBRYT.COM