Wellfleet Adult Community Center
On Exhibit: March 1 - 28
Artist Reception: March 1st - 3:00 - 5:00 PM
Currated by Robert Rindler
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
My aim in this exhibit is to bring to attention the beauty and fragility of our Outer Cape environment, which all who come here and live here, fall in love with. I have been painting this precious part of Cape Cod since first arriving in 1977, mainly with a focus on plein-air watercolor.
Ranging around the dunes, the ponds, and beaches in all seasons, my footsteps have traced pathways that in many cases are no longer accessible. Most early mornings, what a joy to be out in my canoe, carrying all my painting gear, on the glacial kettle ponds with herons and hawks as my companions.
My pastel artwork is also done plein-air; over-laden color-boxes soon outgrew my ability to transport them! Over the years, I have noticed a rising interest in plein-air painting here, and I am sure those artists too have a strong interest in bringing us messages from our endangered world.
Still, it is always an adventure to seek areas that invite me with their beauty, challenge me with their fragile complexity, and become my intimates for as long as I stand before them interpreting their lights and shadows. I hope some of that joyful feeling is conveyed in these paintings.
ARTIST’S BIO
Artist Walter Dorrell began his painting career in the 1960’s primarily using oil paints, but later discovered that watercolor more perfectly captured his impressions when he moved to Cape Cod. A year-round resident for close to 50 years, he still enjoys plein air painting the Outer Cape's inspiring landscape. In recent years, he has also explored pastel, acrylic, and oil stick media, finding them very well-suited to his chosen subject matter and expressing his love of drawing.
Upon graduation from Amherst College in 1955, Walter entered the Air Force to become a jet pilot instructor. After serving his country, he pursued a business career in New York City. During this period, his life-long interest in and practice of art emerged as the driving force in his life. Though largely self-taught, he also studied at the Art Students League in New York, and briefly with noted watercolorist Charles Reid. Travel in Europe and a year-long residency in Urbino, Italy, challenged his eye and broadened his palette. He later settled on Cape Cod with his wife and daughter, and soon opened the Kendall Art Gallery and Frame shop in Wellfleet (1983 – 2015), and devoted his primary efforts to painting and exhibiting his work.
Dorrell has painted the landscape on location as often as weather allowed, venturing out on Outer Cape ponds, inlets, and the Herring River, to paint from his wooden canoe, his "floating studio" built in 1985 by local boat-builder Walter Baron.
During the winter he works in his Wellfleet studio, where the controlled environment allows him to arrange, draw, and paint larger still-life watercolors for which he is especially noted. He has long been an admirer of Asian arts, and a collector of Japanese prints and Netsuke, some of which make their appearance in his own work or influence his use of perspective. Having Asian artist friends has also been creatively meaningful.