Examples of Stephen Tarantal’s shaped canvases that will be included in the upcoming show at Castle Hill.
The Work of Stephen Tarantal
by Rebecca M. Alvin
I’ll bet you think you’ve seen just about every version of a landscape painting that exists living on the Cape with an art market full of such scenes. The beauty and serenity of nature, the wildness of it, the formal exploration of the horizon line, we’ve seen it in painting after painting, photograph after photography—some quite good, others forgettable. But Stephen Tarantal’s landscape is not like the others. Created on his shaped canvases that are almost sculptures in their three-dimensional construction, the sky, the sand, the sea are envisioned in a different way. But these are not new. The 83-year-old Truro artist has been making these works for decades. His work has been commissioned by large corporations like Xerox, AT&T, and Smith Kline, and featured in magazines such as Fortune, Graphis, and Art in America, to name a few. The works blend environmental influences with a futurist sensibility so that when we look at the landscape we also are reminded of mechanical components as the shaped canvases are not your usual rectangles. Some look like a series of smaller canvases shaped into a kind of plumbing, or, looked at another way, like diagrams of molecular structures, in both cases evoking a sense of the building blocks of something larger. As Tarantal puts it, “It depends on how the person sees things…Because it can go in two ways.”
Formerly of New York City, Tarantal and his wife, Tina, have been coming to Truro since 1971, and it’s fair to say the work is influenced by both types of environments. This marriage of industry and nature in these innovative forms creates a unique look at the world that will be on view at the Gallery at Castle Hill October 28 –November 20. The couple built a home in the Truro woods benefitting from Stephen Tarantal’s education in architecture at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. In fact, one of the walls in their home is actually a shaped canvas. His wife, Tina points out that the way the light changes throughout the day and hits the sculptural painting’s edges makes it look different every day, highlighting the dimensions in a playful manner. Indeed, one of the great benefits to works like these is its interaction with light and space. These are large, heavy canvases that impose themselves upon any room, and yet there is a joy to them rather than any somberness. Assembled from canvas stretched over wood and combined into various forms, Tarantal’s pieces resound with movement. They are about relationships between shapes, but also between dimensions, from the flat base canvas to the numerous other canvases attached to it protruding toward us, tantalizing us, almost asking us to touch them. Something about a three-dimensional painting makes the viewer want to interact with it, perhaps because it is more an object than an image.
“I call that one ‘Blue Moon’,” says Tina, pointing to a large, complex piece leaning against the wall of the couple’s dining room in preparation for being sent off to the show at Castle Hill. The couple agree this piece probably has another name, an official one, but the titles are not super important and Tina’s name for it is as good as any, with the moonlike shape in its upper right quadrant. At its center there is an interior enclosure with a form in the center that feels human. Perhaps it is a person, perhaps it is a heart. It is either cozy inside that enclosure or trapped in it. Or maybe both. Tarantal is open to the interpretations that might come, even as he has his own thoughts about it
Vastly different are the curvy, almost reptilian pieces that simultaneously evoke nature and machines. And then there is the piece Verbatim inspired by the computer technology of its time, the early 1980s. Tarantal points out the central floppy disk and the spray of ideas flying out of it toward the top of the piece, depicted as colorful , curved lines in chaotic motion.
Many of the works that will go on exhibit are from an earlier time, and yet they feel relevant and fresh even now. Tarantal has also been working on smaller scale pieces, such as drawings and pastel paintings depicting symmetrical, colorful patterns that will be included in the show as well.
Stephen Tarantal: Shaped Canvasesis on view at the Gallery at Castle Hill, 10 Meetinghouse Rd., Truro, October 28 – November 20. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, October 29, 4 – 6 p.m. For more information call 508.349.7511 or visit castlehill.org.
