Ann Purcell in Provincetown
The Caravan Paintings (1982-1985)
Ann Purcell in Provincetown, 1984.
September 20 – December 1, 2024 Curated by Jean Lawlor Cohen
Ann Purcell
On Caravans
Ann Purcell credits the inspiration of this series to her days in Provincetown. In its landscape and light she found the “mystical, paradoxical space” that her work, at that moment, required. One of her early shows in Provincetown consisted of large acrylic paintings, some overlaid with pieces of canvas, and a series of works on paper, all identified as “Caravans.” The word “caravan,” then and now, evokes exotic travel and the wanderlust that led her to actual adventures up the Amazon and on the high seas. That summer, however, it fit her personal journey as an expressive painter. She was gathering, manipulating and packaging disparate elements as if she were a trader hauling goods along the Silk Road.
Before the 1982 Provincetown sojourn, Purcell had focused on tapestry-like “Playgrounds.” For that series, she scissored “leftovers” of earlier paintings and push-pinned the scraps, fresh “abstractions,” to her studio wall in a revelatory expanse of options. Each fragment, considered a work in its own right, suggested a shape or gesture that could be glued onto grand-scale gessoed and stained canvases. At first, she refused the term “collage” for her “Playgrounds.” She wanted the series taken as “paintings within paintings,” because they used no out-sourced material, only canvas in fragments. Critic Benjamin Forgey rightly credited the pieces’ placement to intuition, seeing the “playgrounds” as both her “process and effect.”
During that first working summer in Provincetown, however, the artist challenged herself to move from pendant installation to canvases pulled tightly across stretchers. Her juxtaposing of shapes in seeming randomness was, in fact, controlled by what critic Dan Cameron called “a new sense of disorderliness.” The forms, he said, came out of “thin lines, drips, oil stick calligraphy, and controlled skeins of color that act as chromatic splinters.” Cameron recognized her lively response to the range of materials as well as her defiance of beauty too easily won.
Purcell’s response to the town’s “special light” not only recharged her palette but justified more complex layering braced by passages of water-based acrylic. She knew that Hans Hofmann had acknowledged the ambience, and she was stunned, during her first days at the Fine Arts Work Center, to learn she occupied his studio. (An irony then unknown: during classes Hofmann himself sometimes attached scraps of canvas to “improve” a student’s work.) Her own additive process, however, paid homage to painters as eclectic as Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell and even James McNeill Whistler. Indeed, Purcell resisted comparison to the “push-pull” theory of that earlier Provincetown denizen. Hofmann’s ghost was not allowed to interfere.
Sense of History
In the main room of Ann Purcell’s apartment in Brooklyn, only two artworks grace the walls, and both are posters by Paul Gauguin—a still-life and a rustic scene with a figure. Beyond rich color, they seem to share little with her own paintings which resolutely avoid all things representational. But the posters confirm an unintimidated openness to art history, the desire to see the discoveries and problems solved by masters. Undaunted, she has made her contrary way through terrains of abstraction and fields of eccentric color.
With much attention now paid to the pioneering women of American abstraction, Purcell and other younger artists must deal with insertion in that genealogy. If “first generation” means Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler, then “second generation” no doubt includes Purcell. In 1983, when her work first showed in Provincetown, writer and close friend Christopher Busa linked her “radical… sumptuous… psychologically various” art to the Expressionists, “as if she were more a daughter
than a disciple to her influences.” Painter friend Mary Louise Long recalls that early in their careers dealer Andre Emmerich applied that label to their contemporaries’ paintings. Both women drew courage from the work and spirit of Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler and, like them, invaded the “macho province” of large scale.
Purcell recalls that “someone once told me that I’d have been as rich and famous as Jackson Pollock, if I were male. But I’ve never felt discriminated against for being female, either in politics or in art. I was often in shows of four men and me.”
Out of the original male Abstract Expressionist cohort she credits Robert Motherwell as very influential. Purcell feels a kinship to his energetic brushstrokes and recalls their lively conversations on his porch during visits to Provincetown. Those early Expressionists remain for her “heroes and heroines, a pantheon, and a hard act to follow.”
Early Lessons
In the 1970s, while still in Washington, D.C., Purcell relished her time spent with two painters of a previous generation. She strolled with her mentor, Gene Davis and Jacob Kainen through museums and New York galleries, critiquing the flawed and parsing the masterpieces. Davis by then had abandoned Abstract Expressionism for infinite variations of the stripe, while Kainen continued his alternating love affairs with figuration and Color Field painting. Although the three differed in life
experience and intentions, they shared a commitment to rigorous artmaking without regard for fortune or fame.
In 1976 E.A. Carmean Jr., the National Gallery’s first curator of 20th-century art, saw Purcell’s Corcoran Gallery solo show and asked to visit her studio. She had a space in the legendary Atlas Building in the capital’s somewhat seedy downtown, where she shielded her privacy after work and on weekends when she could paint. Reluctant and a little intimidated, she asked Gene Davis what to do, and he advised, “select your
Figure 1. Night Bay. 1982, acrylic and collage on canvas, 36 x 36 inches.
three best, and if he doesn’t like those, then he won’t like 30.” So Carmean came, sat on a tall stool, and said nothing as he looked at the chosen three. Then he asked to see a dozen or so more. Purcell recalls, “He told me the paintings would benefit from being a little taller, and I said, ‘well, so would you.’” Fortunately he laughed, became a friend and a supporter, and a few years later he encouraged her to spend time in Provincetown.
When she spent the summer of 1982 at the Fine Arts Work Center, Carmean was in town and introduced her to Motherwell and other key figures all living close by. But that earliest encounter with Carmean had generated his crucial question: “You know you have a unique ability
to convey deep, atmospheric space?” She realized that what he took as intentional “I was doing instinctually.”
And this clearly anticipated her experience the day she arrived. Walking to the water where Portuguese fishing boats and their green, red, and yellow sails floated in the bay, Purcell felt the power of light cast on objects suspended in infinite space.
The impact of that moment resulted in Harbour (1982, Plate 8) and its unusually calm allusions to land and sea—poles of aquamarine and expanses of algae-green brushwork. But the temptation to find natural effects will almost always lead to benign, unintended analogies— movements of clouds or fog, wind made visible, the pentimento of rain. No amount of searching for sources will yield genuine correspondences. Parsing her work in that way may be possible and tempting, but it’s as irrelevant as finding musical notes in the stripes of Gene Davis.
Studio Life
Purcell cherishes the camaraderie with fellow artists during her early Manhattan years. From 1977 for almost a decade, she lived and painted in a Chelsea factory building, her 4th-floor space with a 20-foot ceiling so high “I set up badminton.” Off-hours meant hanging out at SoHo Bar and CBGB and hosting friends like the New Yorker cartoonists who projected slides on her empty walls at parties. During those times that she calls “The Last Bohemia,” landlords tried to oust tenants by shutting off services like heat and elevators, and so she put her political know-how to supporting
Figure 2. Henri Matisse, Intérieur aux aubergines. 1911, tempera on canvas, 83 x 97 inches. Collection of Ville de Grenoble/Musée de Grenoble, France. Photo: J.L. Lacroix. © 2024 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
the Artists Loft Tenants Organization. After a drawn-out lawsuit and pleas before a judge, Purcell, as organizer, with a dozen other artist plaintiffs won cash settlements, hers going to the purchase of her Brooklyn Heights apartment.
The challenge remained to find an adequate, affordable studio, the pursuit she knew echoed frustrations of the Abstract Expressionist painters three decades before. From 1986 to 1991, she rented a space in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “It was a dangerous commute. I know this sounds romantic, because I had a skylight, but it was covered in barbed wire.” She found the next studio in Dumbo, Brooklyn, an industrial neighborhood “where we thought we’d be safe from gentrification. Wrong. Harassment began and forced artists to move again.” Eventually she secured her last studio space in an industrial zone of Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Those who have known Purcell over her career cite the intensity of her work ethic. In the early days, that meant painting alone after her day job and into the night, and later it dictated the regimen of each prolific, impassioned series. “I love the words ‘grit’ and ‘valiant,’” she says. “They summon passion and perseverance. Painting is a marathon, not a sprint.” A number of studio assistants recall the difficulty of matching her endurance and the hours that ate into their social life in the City. Now they treasure the lessons learned, the insights shared, the productive regimen she modeled.
Photos capture Purcell in studios past, but rarely did a studio assistant ever watch her paint. This self-protectiveness she shares with all those who withdraw into what psychologists call “fertile solitude.” Herman Melville referred to the enlightened “isolato” Ishmael, who alone survived to reveal truth. Indeed Purcell admits that the term “isolato,” positing oneself at physical or spiritual remove from the world, “fits me spot on.” For creative folk like Purcell, however, loner status requires choice, taking risks to be self-reliant, free of ultimate influence, and
defiant of expectations. “I was gregarious when I worked in the U.S. Senate and on political campaigns. I liked to be involved with others. But I don’t particularly like to work with others. A painter has it all under her control.”
Painter-writer Paul Behnke found Purcell “refreshing and opinionated.” He says she bemoaned the younger painters who took their colors straight from the tube, and she advised him to mix his paints and then play unlikely hues against a “mother color.” Oil appealed to her for its rich colors, but acrylic became her medium of choice. “It’s spontaneous,” she says, “and you can wipe over it and change it in 15 minutes. I do a lot of scraping away. Palette knife or stick. I’ll just grab at anything, even my good jeans.”
Years ago Purcell worked with a muted palette. “I painted minimal canvases with black, white, and gray, monochromatic colors so the paint would be a neutral. It was hard to tell if a color was green or gray, mauve, or sand.” She claims that she learned about color by “rebelling against my teachers’ theories. I was a contrarian, and I’d do the opposite of what I was told. I’d make the dark colors come forward, and the bright colors stay in the distance. Like Matisse, I believe color is about relationships. I can put down one color, and it calls for what it needs.”
Purcell’s admiration for Matisse, in particular, dates back decades and impacts her thinking even now. His cut-outs and their spontaneous placement she identifies as the “movable process” that propels her own approach to empty canvas. Years ago she hung a poster of Matisse’s painting Still Life with Aubergines (Figure 2, 1911) in her studio and credits it as a major influence. “I see now that I subconsciously absorbed it, and that it manifests in my later Playgrounds and Caravans.”
Indeed the interior depicted in that painting by Matisse signals her own configurations of emerging planes and dissolving corners. Purcell’s floating patches resemble his folding screen, a window, empty frames
and an open door. Even his standing mirror, like a painting within a painting, teases with its reflection of the title vegetables and other objects upended and morphed to further abstraction. Both artists, in effect, play with alternating depth and flatness and with the balance and imbalance of interlocking forms. The term “disorderliness,” once used to characterize Purcell’s work, also factors here in Matisse’s decorative profusion.
In 1983, critic Clement Greenberg visited her New York studio and spent five hours with the variants of her structuring process. He’s the one who called the overlaid elements “patches,” and even now Greenberg’s textile metaphor factors. Seams surface out of juxtaposition, pieces tuck beneath other pieces, and edges join in resid-
ual quilting. Purcell’s layering, however, denies a democracy of forms. Some shapes dominate and control, while others recede beneath scrims of random color. Greenberg said he was bothered by her contrasting of shapes. So Purcell replied, “contrast is supposed to bother you.”
That day with Greenberg and later on a visit to his private collection, the man repeatedly touted Jules Olitski as the modern whose work should matter to her. No doubt he detected in Purcell the ferocity he saw in his favorite painter. He singled out her painting Lascaux (1984, Figure 3) as formative and said, “do more of these.” She had painted it in Provincetown the summer before, its rock-gray expanse marked by calligraphic scrawls. Surely Greenberg realized that the work came not from calculation but from Olitski-like compulsion. For Purcell, that encounter and the painting he singled out proved “germinal.”
Although not a disciple of Jackson Pollock’s all-over gestures, Purcell at times adapted his technique of placing canvases on the studio floor. She leaned in and circled around them with the confidence of the dancer she had studied to be, her movement creating strokes that spun upward and away. The New Criterion’s James Panero identified her compositions as “not so much based on a tension of in and out, surface and depth, but of up and down.” So Purcell, no doubt, operated out of muscle memory, the residual imprint of choreography.
Often vertical elements, hard-edged and organic, provide a work’s structure. Purcell witnessed the shape’s power in Gene Davis’s studio amidst the soaring spans of his stripes. She was also familiar with the poured “veils” of Morris Louis and the ascendant “zips” of Barnett Newman. Yet her own canvases eschew purely geometric or gravitational forms for off-kilter shapes and rough selvage. Hers take off on tangents and lift off the surface like floaters in the eye, refusing to anchor elements or assume a strict axis on a wall. Like dancers they defy gravity.
Figure 3. Ann Purcell, Lascaux, 1984, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 72 x 66 inches. Private Collection
At least two paintings refer to her passion for dance. La Sylphide (2016), a totally abstract work, consists of vertical slashes, one panel filmy, the other black and bold. The tension suggests movement checked before entering bright light. And she relates her Kali Poem #65 to the expressive silhouettes she later discovered in two images—the photo of a ballerina executing a grand jeté and the Japanese woodcut Egret in the Rain, both luminous, curvilinear shapes on black grounds.
Purcell might also credit her appetite for large scale to having studied and taught dance during early years. Canvases that relate in size to her body have always felt more “comfortable.” Their persistent dimensions, many at least six feet high and five feet wide, extend just beyond her height and arm span. More intimate paintings like Night Bay (1982, Figure 1) prove rare, she says, because “It’s hard to contain energy within a small frame. I like to be engulfed by my paintings.” Within her grand-scale canvases, of course, Purcell taps into the power of small forms. Perhaps those serve as grace notes, creating sightlines across atmospheric grounds. Perhaps they serve as reminders of options remaining to be called into play. She teased herself, saying “I always wanted...if there is reincarnation!... to come back as a Persian miniaturist. I’d have far fewer logistical problems.”
While working for Ralph Bakshi, the animated film director famed for Fritz the Cat, Purcell became intrigued by the capture of time, motion, and sequence. Why not, she asked, “break painting away from its rigid and static state?” This led to creating works as pages in accordion-style Kali Poem Books, sequences of abstract images that required manipulation in real time. (The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. acquired one for its collection.) What mattered in music, film, and dance—rhythm, interval and staccato repetition— began to factor in intimate works and then in much larger diptychs, triptychs, quadriptychs, screens and serialized abstractions.
At times, Purcell’s relentless search for the new seems to evolve out of higher play, what critic Dan Cameron attributed to her “savvy and sass.” Because the paintings surface not from dark thoughts or existential anxiety but out of curiosity and daring, some identify this mode as “lyrical abstraction.” That alone helps distance her and the “wildness” she aims for from the emotional, often brooding wellsprings of early Abstract Expressionism. She puts it simply, “I’m free in chaos until I find the order, or the order finds me.”
The Process
Purcell always acknowledges the primacy of whim, intuition, and instinct. A work’s ultimate composition derives from the play of forms that seem to rise out of her subconscious. No preliminary studies dictate the movement of her wrist or interfere with an “in-the moment” response to the paint. Rarely a sketch from earlier times resurfaces and in it Purcell recognizes a current shape she once tinkered with yet abandoned. All of this factors in the process she describes as “thinking but not thinking, being loose and free but controlled.” She has always reckoned with and embraced these dual impulses. “I can be analytical and intuitive at the same time.”
In 1985, Purcell posed for a photo holding one of her Kali series paintings with its stretcher and backside toward the camera. The raw canvas, marked with dueling arrows in bold scribbles, indicated that she questioned the axis on which it might hang. But Purcell smiles, delighting in a scene that another artist might feel reveals uncertainty. Self-assured, she documents the willingness to rethink a work and the freedom that abstraction grants her.
Purcell owes her ability to construct, revisit and spin to the quirky way her mind works. Despite the intensity and rigor of her studio life, she allows for abrupt directional turns. Even as she relied on her subconscious for
inventing forms, she knew that walking on the beach or playing tennis might also imprint outlines and relationships that could surface once back in the studio. Race Point (1882, Plate 2), for example, was not a landscape she chose to depict. In fact, the site remained out of mind until the canvas-in-process evoked its palette, topography, and rightness as a title.
Rarely does a piece of music suggest a project, but Vivaldi inspired her desire to paint a canvas for each of his “Four Seasons.” Dissatisfied with the too-green-yellow “Summer” component, she dropped it, hence the triptych titled Lost Season. Sometimes a series dictates titling itself by number, but on at least one occasion she allowed for whimsical autobiography. She titled one vibrant work “Caprichosa,” the name of a lavish, multi-ingredient pizza that she ate in Ecuador. Ironically the word itself is Spanish slang for an arbitrary, playful and stubborn free spirit who acts as she pleases.
Looking Closer
One way to enter a painting by Purcell is to choose a single element and follow its trajectory. In other words, read the work in time. Another way is to let its title spin out free associations. After all, Purcell chooses titles for their peripheral resonance. “I never want titles to lock into something specific. They’re poetic references meant to evoke a viewer’s own responses.”
Almost always concocted after a work is finished, her titles spring from sensory experience. Certainly the music Purcell listens to while painting has evoked a few labels. Paintings like Ellington, Piaf, and the Sarah Vaughan-inspired Sassy series “pay homage to a few of the greats.” No surprise that Purcell, a “jazz groupie,” named Lush Life for Billy Strayhorn’s poignant score or that she listened to Yo-Yo Ma’s “Silk Road” when making Caravans. Purcell admits that, on occasion, “I gave some paintings meaningless titles just to confuse the critics. I
named one Oscar after the Swiss guy who drove us from Panama to Mexico.”
Purcell credits the title Moody Blues (1982, Plate 3) to her imagination, but surely she listened to “Nights in White Satin,” the anthem of that so-named legendary band. If music indeed cues a memory, this canvas evokes a deeply sad love song. If emotion alone directs the way in, the canvas becomes a glimpse into the artist’s state of mind. The work surprises with its stable verticality, rectangles stacked like objects on display, their wildness contained by a narrow palette of white and blue. The artist also surprises by applying commercial metallic paint, silver and gold, giving subtle reflections to its gessoed ground.
Purcell says Fast Summer (1982, Plate 5) happened after an idyllic, too short stay in Provincetown. Waves roll across its “heated” red ground, while rectangles hover, calligraphy recedes, and a mottled square anchors one corner like a tiny blanket. Purcell explains the title, “We all know how quickly a good summer of sun and fun can go! Sometimes my gallerist Christine Berry hangs it near her desk. I think she’s pretending she’s still at the beach.”
In Harting (1983-1999, Plate 4), the overlays offer a reprieve from rational order, and paint moves in two directions, from airy strokes toward murky stains. Matte and roughness coexist as do hard-edge and cursive. This painting allows what may be the only use of another artist’s work. The tilted square, a small striped canvas that’s likely a “color testing section,” came directly from Gene Davis. One day in his studio, he gave it to Purcell, purposely linking the gesture to Rauschenberg’s legendary erasure of a Willem de Kooning drawing.
The rigorous three-foot square Night Bay (1982, Figure 1) suggests a window onto water and sky. Overlaid with rectangles—a floating pair and a rightangled “signpost and flag,” the dark, scumbled ground with a patch of sand flips between seascape and what could be an aerial view of surf broken by phosphorescence. Race Point (1982, Plate 2) refers to an actual
“I don’t know why people think that artists should suffer.
Artists do more for humankind creating beauty than most professions do.”
Provincetown site where the Old Harbor Life-Saving Station has been salvaged from erosion. There storm-driven ships hit shallow sand bars and broke into pieces under raging water, spilling cargo and human crews. The title may have been anticipated by the uneasy alignments of her marks and forms. Patches fly away, but a rare edge-to edge “platform” and solidstripe pylon imply the safety of shore.
Years back the critic Benjamin Forgey credited Balthazar’s Gifts (1983, Plate 6) to “virtuoso” talent. Its ground of royal purple becomes an envelope for objects whimsical and pastel, matte and rough-hewn, delivered by a biblical king. How can they not be read as such with this title? In some ways, the exuberant elements seem footnotes to the larger work, clues to the artist’s own gestating ideas, expectations not yet realized, gifts to be opened.
Gypsy Wind (1983, Plate 1) intrigued critic Dan Cameron with its anchored composition and what he
called “the velocity of painted lines…the tough, visceral quality” of its forms. The New Criterion’s James Panero cited its blue triangle that “tips like a lever” anticipating movement. With time’s passage this seems a key work, unusually complex and incorporating many of what become signature elements in Purcell’s work. The title (“I think I made it up”) actually refers to an aberrant current of air in sailor lexicon or, more Purcell-like, the unpredictable movements of a gypsy life.
The title Shaman (1982, Plate 7) reflects the influence of Purcell’s mystical painter friend Ananda, who encouraged being open to the subconscious. Thanks to courses in religion, Purcell knew the word meant a person in touch with good and evil spirits. The painting’s elements signal such hybrid antagonism, a faceoff between anchored verticals and geometric floaters. No doubt a shaman’s trance-like state resembles an artist’s immersion in the act of painting, what Purcell describes as “you’re doing it but you’re not aware of what you’re doing.”
Dancer. Student of Philosophy. Senator’s legislative assistant. Political campaigner. Filmmaker. Teacher. Music lover. Set designer. Civil rights activist. World traveler. Party girl. Purcell took on many identities before committing to life as a painter. But a little-known early chapter—her time spent acquiring a Master’s degree—hints at the serious, spirited artist she became in her late 20s. Her graduate school thesis proposed that Friedrich Nietzsche’s Dionysian principle had influenced the painting of Jackson Pollock and others. She knew that Nietzsche said great art must fuse the Apollonian (reason, logic, structure) and the Dionysian (ecstasy, revelry, fruitfulness). Purcell answered that challenge with vibrant canvases, brutal and refined. Now her journey celebrates abstraction’s legacy and its ongoing power.
—Jean Lawlor Cohen, Curator
PLATE 1. GYPSY WIND 1983 ACRYLIC AND COLLAGE ON CANVAS 72 X 60 IN.
Collection of FAMM Museum, Mougins, France / The Levett Collection
PLATE 2. RACE POINT 1982 ACRYLIC AND COLLAGE ON CANVAS 72 X 66 IN.
PLATE 3. MOODY BLUES 1982 ACRYLIC, SILVEROIL, COPPEROIL, AND PIECED PAPER ON CANVAS
72 X 66 IN.
PLATE 4. HARTING 1983-99 ACRYLIC AND COLLAGE ON CANVAS 48 X 54 IN.
PLATE 5. FAST SUMMER 1982 ACRYLIC AND COLLAGE ON CANVAS 66 X 72 IN.
PLATE 6. BALTHAZAR’S GIFTS 1983 ACRYLIC AND COLLAGE ON CANVAS 72 X 66 IN.
PLATE 7. SHAMAN 1982 ACRYLIC AND COLLAGE ON CANVAS 66 X 72 IN.
PLATE 8. HARBOUR 1982 ACRYLIC AND COLLAGE ON CANVAS 72 X 66 IN.
Pearls from Purcell
I want to live like Mary Tyler Moore and paint like Jackson Pollock, not the other way around.
I paint to satisfy myself. I am the final judge.
I don’t reminisce about my studios, because they were at times very dangerous places. There wasn’t any artist loft romanticism. My studios were never cozy, well polished, safe or sanitary.
As a child I went to National Press Club with my father, and there was the “Naked Maja” painting over the bar. I was the only other girl in the room.
My dealer Tibor de Nagy told me that when he was a boy his stepfather would ask what two museum works he’d want to buy. I told Tibor that’s the difference between the art dealer and the artist. I go through museums and decide which two paintings I want to steal!
One summer the Corcoran School announced an “Ann Purcell class” in which everyone could work on whatever they wanted. It was a good, unstructured melange, and they never offered anything like it again.
I have about six different series, and all are ongoing. They have no beginning or end dates. I leave myself open to do what I need to do, no matter what I did before.
I got a sculpture from Africa, because I admired its abstract form. Years passed before I realized it was a nursing mother!”
One of the “Caravans” is 22 feet long, because that’s where my wall stopped.
When you’re wondering when to stop a painting, stop right then. Leave it open. Let it breathe.
When you don’t know what to do next with a painting, do the unexpected.
When you can’t make a choice between two things, do both.
I went to work for Senator Proxmire with braces on my teeth.
My painting has always been about working within tensions of paradox, ambiguity, duality, contradictions and uniting those polarities.
If I could live another life, I’d like to be a jazz singer.
The teachers who most strongly influenced me were Bob Stackhouse and Gene Davis. Stackhouse opened me up to drawing and showed you can splatter and blob and use all possibilities. He’d make me dig out answers for myself. Gene Davis was important for his ideas. He made me question.
I didn’t like teaching students who just wanted to make portfolios and be rich and famous, so I quit to protect my optimism.
I wanted to create a dialogue between paintings, a dialogue sometimes understandable and harmonious, at other times jarring, chaotic, confusing. A new way of seeing.
I can happily get back to my quill and scroll and papyrus and paintbrush!
I envision my retrospective at the Guggenheim. I’d like to open the show by whirling on skates down the spiral.
Ann Purcell arriving in Provincetown, 1984.
Purcell on Provincetown
I was immersed in life there—biking the Dune Bike Trail, playing hours of tennis, partying, going to the beaches, walking the streets.
My Provincetown studio was small but workable. It had windows high up that didn’t let in the sun.
I’d get the best lobster roll in town at The Dairy Queen, then return to the studio and paint all afternoon.
The Portuguese fishermen said it was a bad fishing day, but we still went out on the bay. I reeled in a 12-pound bluefish so frantically my bathing suit top was falling down. It was vanity or the fish. I chose the fish.
It was down to earth… no hierarchy by age or importance, totally egalitarian.
There’s something in the air in Provincetown. Almost everyone is an artist, and even the unknown ones are good. This includes the fishermen, many of them very good painters.
“At the end of a day I’d walk to Commercial Street, where you’d run into someone you knew—go for dinner, walk the beach at sunset, gather with other artists at a bar in the East End. A perfect small town.”
I know that Provincetown is considered an art colony, but I didn’t think of it as such. There is a Hamptons “scene” but not a Provincetown one.
I see forms, colors, relationships, space. I do not see images nor do I look for them in others’ paintings.
Ann Purcell in Provincetown, 1984.
Ann Purcell Timeline
1941—is born in Washington, D.C., her parents New Yorkers who move there when New York Daily News makes her father Jack its first White House correspondent.
Late-1940s—sometimes accompanies her father, by then a CBS radio correspondent, to the all-male National Press Club, chats with Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid, also visits the Oval Office where she often sees President Truman, makes The Associated Press news herself when he enters to “Hail To the Chief,” and she wails, “Why do we have to stand up for Harry?” When Jack Purcell refuses to divulge a source, he is fired by Time. “He was respected as an early defender of reporters’ rights.”
1954-1959 —attends St. Mary’s Academy, Alexandria, Virginia, on full scholarship and produces her first painting, “a copy in oil of Picasso’s White Clown, because I thought it was easy. But it was not!”; reads Maugham’s Gauguin biography and paints Gauguin-like still life
1959 —receives a scholarship to Dunbarton College, a Catholic women’s school in D.C. but, when her father falls ill, leaves after one semester to help support family. “I was a serious student but went into hysterical tears when a nun suggested I had a calling.”
1960 —sells her classic MG-TF, accompanies friend to Hawaii and takes history of philosophy at the University of Hawaii, Oahu; returns and uses secretarial skills as a Ford Motor Company VP’s executive assistant for three years
1963—hangs with actor friends at Theatre Lobby, paints stage sets for Summer & Smoke and for productions at Arena Stage
1964 —is hired as receptionist in the office of Senator William Proxmire, but soon becomes personal secretary producing speeches, position papers and weekly radio scripts.
1968 —serves on Senate floor as one of Proxmire’s two legislative aides, repeatedly kicked out for wearing pantsuits (though miniskirts allowed), so eventually forced a rule change to benefit female staffers and her male colleague’s florid necktie
1970 —co-produces and writes 32 TV films and radio commercials for the Senator’s campaign and for other Democratic races
1971—works for George McGovern as he announces his presidential run, but to “satisfy a compulsion to paint a full day,” quits her job, leaves for San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, hangs with ex-pat poets, receives her first solo exhibition at Villa Roma Gallery and hangs in a Misrachi Gallery group show near Picasso
1973—after 12 years of night school, earns B.F.A. in Painting, Corcoran School of Art and George Washington U., securing one final credit in a summer course by Gene Davis who recognized her drive to paint
1974 —is juried into the Corcoran Gallery’s “19th Area Exhibition” with three all-black paintings; becomes a Corcoran School instructor of painting, drawing, collage and
art history but also works nights as coatcheck girl at Blues Alley jazz club
1974-1976 —has work selected by USIA for U.S. Art in Embassies, teaches courses at Smithsonian Institution
1975—is finalist for the Prix de Rome, turns down MacDowell art residency because she can’t leave job
1976 —shows drawings in two-person show at Pyramid Gallery, Washington, D.C.; has solo of 25 paintings within “Five Plus One” at the Corcoran Gallery, curated by Jane Livingston (Dealer Ramon Osuna sells all of them to select collectors within two hours.)
1977—moves to New York 7/7/77 and takes a live-in studio (for eight years) on 6th Avenue at 21st St., across from the Limelight club in Chelsea; for two years teaches painting and art history at Parsons School of Design but for three years commutes weekly to teach at the Corcoran School
1978 —has solo shows at Ramon Osuna’s Pyramid Gallery, D.C.; visits Provincetown for several seasons on breaks from the city; walks into Tibor de Nagy Gallery with portfolio and wins spot in group show. Andre Emmerich reaches out with encouragement.
1980 —Tibor de Nagy mounts her solo show (then another in 1983).
1981—Ramon Osuna shows five works inspired by Matisse cutouts and Frank Stella’s multi-layer Indian Birds
1982—spends the summer at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown; has solo show at Hokin Gallery in Chicago
1983—serves as artist-in-residence for graduate students at Indiana State University; begins “Kali Poem” series inspired by May Sarton poem invoking the Hindu goddess; is included in Provincetown Group Gallery show, reviewed by Chris Busa who calls Purcell “deliberately anti-elegant…she’s the real deal”
1984 —has solo at Shainman’s Massimo Gallery, Provincetown; then solos in 1985 and 1986 at Jack Shainman Gallery there
1986 —rents studio in Bedford-Stuyvesant and commutes to it for five years; shows at Philip Dash Gallery (through 1999) in the East Village
1987—has Osuna Gallery solo show in which a critic sees “rugged brushstroke of a Franz Kline” and is hired as personal assistant to film directors Martin Scorsese and Michael Apted
1988 —as an editorial temp assistant at Viking Penguin, works for Peter Mayer whose publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses put him under fatwa; wins Lester Hereward Cooke Foundation Grant, National Gallery of Art; speaks about Gene Davis on panel at National Museum of American Art
1989 —earns Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; lectures and enjoys students at Long Island University
1990 —shows Vanishing Time Diptych, an early Kali Poem painting, at Cooper Union in “Primal Forces” curated by Studio Museum of Harlem; spends part of the year in London studying theater and screenwriting, travels to Belfast during the “troubles”
1991-1994 —teaches at public Manhattan Night and Day School, engaging students with innovative art-music programs
1992—National Museum of Women in the Arts acquires a Kali Poem; Art in Embassies sends a work to Katmandu, Nepal.
1994-1995 —is included in “American Painters,” Art in Embassies exhibition Stockholm, Sweden
1995—earns MA in Interdisciplinary and Multicultural Studies, New York University, her thesis the impact of Nietzsche’s Dionysian principle on Abstract Expressionists
2001-2005—works as executive assistant in office of NYU President John Sexton, painting at night and on weekends
2001-2002—has solo shows at Hokin Gallery, Palm Beach and Miami
2013 —wins New York Foundation for the Arts Grant
2014 —earns Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant
2015 —solo exhibition “Paintings from the 1970s” shown by Berry Campbell Gallery, New York.
2018 —Berry Campbell solo show of Caravan series; GWU’s Luther Brady Gallery at the Corcoran features Purcell’s Harting in “Full Circle: Hue and Saturation in the Washington Color School.”
2019 —included in Brady Gallery’s “A Time for Action: Washington Artists Circa 1989,” in the wake of threats to NEA funding.
2020 —Berry Campbell solo show of Kali Poem series
2021—shows Harlequin Spring in group exhibition “In The Abstract,” tracing the evolution of expressionism, Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, Maine
2022 Luxe Interiors + Design magazine features Sassy #2, its title honoring the velvet voice of Sarah Vaughn.
2023—participates in East Hampton group show at Frampton & Co.
2024—Berry Campbell mounts the all-female exhibition “Perseverance.” From it the Femme Artistes du Musée de Mougins, France, the first museum in Europe dedicated to female artists, purchases Gypsy Wind.
