Art
This sunny Saturday in West Tisbury, Allen Whiting is out at his easel, working at his latest landscape and simultaneously working at his answers to questions about his art.
His approach to both tasks is similar: He goes at it enthusiastically for awhile, then pauses to reconsider things, then goes back and adds another layer.
Ask, for example, why an artist who seldom shows outside his own gallery has decided to put on a retrospective of his work at Featherstone Center for the Arts, and he gives a succession of answers.
First up, he is glib.
It’s summertime and Martha’s Vineyard looks like one big landscape oil painting. Simply perfect and bursting with both subtle shades and vibrant colors. Shame the Island is too big to pop in the trunk of the car and take home to remember such perfection all winter long. We have tried, but no go, even with one of those clamshells on the roof-rack. Chappy keeps blowing off midway home and ending up in the tall weeds somewhere off 95.
Three years ago, Rose Abrahamson told a Vineyard Gazette reporter her art show then at the Shaw Cramer Gallery was her last. Now this summer, at 89 years of age, she is saying this show at the same gallery will be her last.
As talented and respected as she is, whenever Mrs. Abrahamson produces new paintings it calls for an exhibit. And just as well she is having another, because this show includes what she calls the best piece she ever has made.
Milestones
On the weekend of May 13 to 15, the Rotary Club of Martha’s Vineyard hosted approximately 200 active Rotarians at the annual district 7950 conference held at the Harbor View Hotel in Edgartown.
The Amish Project is a play that faces big questions head on, including how do you forgive the murder of five innocent little girls?
The play is based on the tragic events of Oct. 2, 2006 when a gunman entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and shot 10 young girls, killing five of them.
Later the Amish people of that community publicly forgave the gunman in a service of reconciliation. Eventually, the West Nickel Mines schoolhouse was torn down and the New Hope School was built at another location.
Remember that old Dylan song, “Somethin’ is happenin’, but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?” In the opening first scene of the two-person play, coming2terms, at the Vineyard Playhouse, we’re all Mr. Joneses as we try to figure out what a particular attractive couple is up to. They’re coming across with everything long-term couples tend to do. Bickering? Check! Avoiding larger issues? Check! Sharing their day? Check!