Twenty Summers Cape School Journey The First Summer

While I was a student at the Art Student's League in New York, I took a trip to Provincetown. I fell in love with the town right away. A friend told me that I could take a landscape painting class at the Cape Cod School of Art on the top of Pearl Street.
The Magical old barn that once was Charles Hawthorn's Studio was everything a historic art school should be.
Drying racks full of colored paintings that went back 80 years. Dusty bottles, pans and various still life objects cluttered paint chipped shelves.

The Cape Cod School of Art was owned at the time by Lois Griffel. Lois was a student of Henry Hensche. Lois encouraged me to come back to the school the following summer. "This isn't a school to learn how to paint pretty landscape pictures, this is a school where one learns to see color" Lois told me.

The paintings seemed very pastel to me and I wasn't sure why and then I realized they where filled with color and light. Somehow I realized I was going to not only learn to see color this way but, that I would live in this old barn as well. In fact my journey had begun at this point. I ended up spending four summers living in that barn.

A bird decided to keep me company one morning and stayed on my shoulder the whole morning.

The back of the barn was called the sandbox because Hensche filled it with sand, thinking you could see color better. I spent hours and weeks painting still life and blocks wanting to see the color the way that was reflected in the pictures which hung in the old barn.

That old barn on 46 Pearl street was really a part of Americana and the last hold out to bohemian Provincetown. Provincetown was changing when I was painting the summer of 1995 but it was still a thriving art colony and community that encouraged young painters making possible to spend a summer learning something frivolous as seeing color.
The current Provincetown is still a wonderful walkable town full of galleries, restaurants, beaches. The artist I am today is  due to the training I received and the experience of living  in a wonderful art community in a simply time, that is no longer.