Christopher Pullman
Beached:
Rocks & Crustaceans

Installed: April, 2020
Watercolors
Artist website: christopherpullman.com

(Click to enlarge all images)

A bit about me: I graduated from Princeton in 1963 with a degree in American History, but with a strong interest in the visual arts. This drew me to Yale’s graduate program in Graphic Design, where I received my MFA in 1966 and began teaching in the program, an affiliation I maintain today, offering a course in designing with time, motion and sound. It was also at Yale that I met and married my classmate, Esther, now a photographer.

In 1973 we moved to Cambridge and for 35 years I served as the Vice President for Design and Visual Communication at WGBH, Public media in Boston. It was a wonderful place to work. At the end of my time with WGBH I helped guide the design of its new headquarters in Brighton and developed the large digital mural seen from the Mass Pike. In 2001 my work as a designer and teacher was recognized by the American Institute of Graphic Art with its highest honor, the AIGA Medal.

 It was during my time at WGBH that I began to paint, first on the weekends and while traveling, and since retiring from WGBH, more seriously. In 2005 I had a one-person show at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester and have shown my paintings several times at the Gladstone Gallery in Manchester-by-the-Sea and the Jane Deering Gallery in Gloucester. But mostly I paint for my own enjoyment.

About the works: This virtual exhibition looks at two distinctive residents of the seashore.

Since 1975 we have spent much of the summers in a small unheated cottage in Annisquam, an hour north of Boston on Cape Ann. Founded in 1631, the village sits at the mouth of a tidal river that drains an expanse of marshland and connects with the more familiar port of Gloucester.

This exhibition looks at two distinctive residents of the seashore. One group of paintings­ depict the huge boulders dropped 10,000 years ago by the retreating glaciers on the beach below our cottage. Many paintings include the same three rocks (my favorites, you might say) that you can see in the large picture of me painting above.

The other group, by contrast, depicts part of the transient, non-descript detritus washed up on the beach twice daily by the tide. These tiny crab claws—most no bigger than your little finger—are the leftovers after the gulls get done with them.

Both subjects are seen unnaturally. The giant rocks end up on a piece of paper small enough to hold in my lap. The claws end up unsettlingly large, but at a scale where their sculptural forms and subtle colors can be appreciated and their complex engineering understood, when before they were just unexceptional, overlooked flotsam.

The claws are small things seen big; the rocks are big things seen small. For the painter, the closer we look the more detail we see and can depict. The reverse happens as we miniaturize: the smaller the scale, the more our tools force us to generalize and find the essential form. In each case the activity involves looking at things closely, and often; looking at familiar things in an unfamiliar way.

I began painting watercolors when we moved to the Boston area and began spending our summers in Annisquam. At first, I painted shoes and pails and other objects deposited by bathers on the beach; then a phase painting houses in the village. This was followed by a fascination with the giant trawlers hauled up in dry dock. Somewhere along the way I started painting with oil as well.

Then around 2000 I started trying to paint the handsome boulders that litter Cambridge Beach. They were convenient, cooperative subjects which took on different aspects with the shifting weather, tide, time of day and point of view. Most were painted on the spot, often at the end of the day; some were painted over the winter in my studio in Somerville from references made during the summer. Over the years it represents an exercise in theme and variation (like Monet’s haystacks).

It was 2012 when walking on the beach I finally noticed that a busted crab might be an interesting subject and not until 2017 that I thought to see what they looked like BIG. (In my mind was the gigantic flea, observed through a telescope and engraved by scientist Robert Hooke, that had unnerved London in 1665.)

Since then I have actively looked for interesting specimens on the beach and on our travels. Friends even send them to me in the mail! I have now painted maybe 38 different crab claws and other busted parts, mostly 15x22”, some as big as 24x36”.

We hope you enjoy Chris’s work. If you’d like, you can click below to send him
a comment or question…

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