black duck bridge (oil on panel, 18 x 24”)
A New Path for Cathleen Daley
by G.W. Mercure
Where does one change end and another begin? Is change linear, circular, racing its parallels, all varying lengths, to the spot we call Now? Is change really inevitable? On a long enough timeline, will the changes in a person or their work even appear?
Artist Cathleen Daley, whose new and markedly different work will debut at the Alden Gallery this month attributes these changes to a variety of things. Was it her recent move to Vermont from Boston that most impacted this change? Yes, she says. Did the isolation during Covid have much of an impact on your work? Oh, the biggest, she says.
She is still exploring the changes, in real time, as we speak. Or, rather, she’s observing them.
Daley has exhibited with the Alden Gallery since 2007. She is a skilled and attentive observational landscape artist whose work suggests John Constable with a bit more of an eye for the quiet and the whimsical. At least, it was like that. The work that will debut at Alden this month is a great deal more expressionistic. (Daley refers to the new elements as abstractions, drawing on the work that she did without models for quite some time.) Passive, medium views of curiously climbing hills and lemon-flavored greens have been replaced with chromatic ranges that are most immediately jarring, approaching, even looming.
She splits her time between her new home in Vermont and her old home in Boston. Her work process gained a productive duality as she visited forests in Vermont for observational work, and then built those observations into larger-scale paintings while working in Boston.
“I started exploring the monochrome,” she says, “because I sort of had to. I wasn’t even looking at anything. So I said, ‘Let’s just take this tube of, you know, gourmet green or this radiant pink, and just paint a painting with this.’ Because it doesn’t matter what it looks like. That was another level of liberation.”
Daley grew up in Ebenezer, New York, and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston after completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Howard Karren, director of the Alden Gallery, found her work in a show at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) and signed her to Alden. In 2023, she moved with her husband to Vermont. The move to Vermont simplified Daley’s life, her observations, and her work.
“It’s kind of where it happened, right here. I was still working abstractly through Covid, but spending a lot of time in the woods—as many people were—where I felt good and safe and just able to understand that much; a place that I could understand that much. In the most basic way—basic and essential kind of way, that’s what I felt here. It just reassigned me as an artist, as a person who has a job: This is my expected role. Yeah, it just simplified everything.”
As much as the work that was produced has forked away from the work that preceded it, to Daley, it is a return. “Observation was the beginning of my work, really,” she says.
Daley’s introduction to careful, mindful observation began in high school, with an art teacher who had been a student of the watercolorist Charles E. Burchfield. The teacher would assign entire class periods to simply looking out the window.
“‘You’re gonna look out the window. You’re just gonna look and you’re going to just name every color you see,” she recalls. “That kind of sort of scrutiny, that sort of attention to the natural world was given to me early.”
Daley has returned to that kind of painting. “Covid had a lot to do with it. I think that kind of gap, that kind of stopping, I mean the world stopping, and everybody reassessing life and place and all that stuff,” she says. What she was returning from, and what pulled her away from observational work in the first place, was a trauma and a loss that she doesn’t prefer to talk at length about. “I didn’t want to look at the world anymore.”
And then Covid.
And then Vermont.
The new work, she says, is looking at more than the forest and the trees. It’s looking deeper than that. Further than that.
“It’s a conjoining of earlier times of my life and middle times in my life, and now the abstract ways and practices meet the real world. It’s like this simultaneous action of seeing, really wanting to see, but really wanting to feel, in tandem. So, it’s as much about seeing this feeling and recapturing, not so much the picture of a place, but the sense and my response to it.
“Just to be present, and be present for what is here, and avail myself to it, take it in. I thought I was fooling myself. I was just going to start by getting to know this tree and that, and I found it was a place that I could really fold in that whole language of abstraction. These paintings in my mind: When I’m working on them, they do have other metaphorical meanings,” she explains.
Meanings related to nature, our struggling, maligned ecology? Related to work and painting, art? Related to the country’s unprecedented changes? The pandemic? Vermont? Yes.
“Yeah,” she says. “There’s definitely some stuff in there, but it’s not coming from me so much as I’m being drawn to it.”
Cathleen Daley’s new work is on view at Alden Gallery, 423 Commercial At., Provincetown, July 25 – August 7. There will be an opening reception on Friday, July 25, 7 – 9 p.m. For more information call 508.487.4230 or visit aldengallery.com.
