^{Dune Shack Moonrise (oil on canvas, 9×12”)}

The Work of Valerie Isaacs

by Jaiden van Bork

It is incredibly hard to talk to any artist residing in Provincetown without addressing the elephant in the room; the one character in Cape Cod’s eccentric and wild cast, who refuses to leave center stage. Many image-makers throughout history have chased this elusive yet ever-present being; and throughout the long and storied canon of Provincetown art, this figure shows up time and time again, in painting after painting, photograph after photograph—a mystical force that haunts every grain of sand on the beach, every face on the street, every drop of water in the ocean, every shingle on every roof, and every moment in time. Valerie Isaacs is perpetually obsessed with it: the light. 

But her fixation, in particular, stands out from others. The painter grew up in the American South, moving to Massachusetts in 1999, where she began coming to Provincetown on camping trips. What stunned her most was the overwhelming prevalence of painting culture. “The person in the hardware store in line in front of me would be buying canvas, or I’d go into Far Land and there would be three painters talking about painting at the next table…” she says, “I’d never lived in a place where painting was relevant and a central part of the culture.”

 

Ten years ago, after coming and going regularly, Isaacs finally moved to Provincetown to stay. With a background in architecture, Isaacs was immediately drawn to the interplay of light and geometry she found all over town: the structure of piers and wharves, the reflections of boats in the water. How did these things work? How does light behave that way?

Time increasingly led Isaacs away from the man-made structures of town and out into nature, into the dunes, where even more complex quandaries emerged from the cascading structures of sand, dotted with plants and animals living amidst this otherwise barren landscape. “I certainly learned a lot…” she says, “[It] was kind of a horticultural study. The work that I do in the dunes is a lot about studying the plants and how the dunes get blown together.”

There is a level of almost scientific inquiry in the way that Isaacs approaches painting. Wherever she is, she tends to paint the same things over and over again. “There’s this little strand of pine trees that I like on [Route] 6A, and there’s a certain spot in the marsh that I’ve become very attached to,” Isaacs explains, “There’s this one place where the water goes over the road—I’ve only painted it a couple times—I have not yet figured out how to paint it. I get obsessed with certain places… trying to understand it, trying to get to know a thing.”

As much as it is about study and analysis, Isaacs describes her painting as an act of reverence and spirituality, too. “What I’m doing out there is basically nature worship,” she says with a laugh, “It’s hard to speak about it without sounding like a religious fanatic, but it’s a very emotional activity.” She recounts that she would “hallucinate” as she spent more and more time staring at water, painting it over and over. “You don’t even need drugs if you go out there and stare at the reflection of the boats in the water,” she jokes. “It’s the thing that people are looking for drugs for.”

Still there is a third aspect of Isaacs’ practice: one of collection. “It’s kind of a way of keeping something,” she says, “I’m trying to internalize it.” As much as she is a scientist and a worshipper, she is also something of a cartographer, mapping the dunes and the waters of the harbor through images, moments, and feelings. 

“I’m finding that my main interest right now is the air,” she continues. “The atmosphere, and the light, and the way the air feels.” She describes a unique phenomenon that occurs at dusk: “There’s a sort of materiality to the light; and the water, and the air, and the clouds become one thing, [while] the solidity of the structures and the land are another… You can just feel the atmosphere; you can just feel the light.” 

This convergence of solid forms and unseeable forces pushes Isaacs’ work further into a world abstraction, where the light has viscosity, weight, and physical presence. “The way to describe light and space to me usually ends up being more abstract,” she says. “Like the light on the side of the building—sometimes that’s best said with a very abstract summarizing mark that isn’t about the windows or the siding or, you know, all the different details. It’s just about the light.”  Next to some of her more representational paintings, these works demonstrate an incredible artistic range, which gives Isaacs the ability to expose the full properties of every surface, every substance, every shadow, and every shimmer of light. Her new show opening at the Four Eleven Gallery on September 11 is appropriately titled Atmosphere: New Works by Valerie Isaacs.

“Light seems to be my connection to nature,” Isaacs says, perhaps meaning that light is what drew her to the water and to the dunes, but also perhaps meaning that light is the vehicle through which one can convene with nature visually, through which a beach plum transports itself from the sand of the dunes, to the tip of a paintbrush, and into the eye of a viewer. In Isaacs’ paintings, the light beckons us to sink deeper into the world around us, to immerse ourselves enough in our surroundings to begin to understand them.

Atmosphere: New Works by Valerie Isaacs will be on view at Four Eleven Gallery, 411 Commercial St., Provincetown, September 11 – October 1, with an opening reception Friday, September 11 at 6 p.m., which Isaacs plans to attend. For more information visit fourelevengallery.com.