New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting & Sculpture
The New York Studio School is pleased to announce Pat de Groot: Sea Smoke, curated by Kara Carmack. The exhibition represents the first posthumous survey of de Groot’s work, featuring her book designs, works on paper, and paintings from the artist’s more than 60-year career. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, November 21, from 6 to 8pm.
Pat de Groot’s paintings emerge from her deep connection to the distinctive geographic and atmospheric conditions of Provincetown, MA, where she settled in 1963 with her husband Nanno de Groot, a Dutch-born Abstract Expressionist painter. Rarely exceeding 12 x 11 inches in size, her intimate oil-on-board paintings of the Provincetown Harbor outside of her studio window transcend the genre of “seascapes.” They are not merely paintings of the sea, sky, and sand, but rather evocative meditations on perception, meteorological conditions, and the natural world. De Groot withholds the idyllic comfort of the pastorals of William Merritt Chase and the aggrandizement of the Romantic sublime of Thomas Doughty and Thomas Cole. Further, she turns her back to the industries, immigration, and tourism that define Provincetown life and preoccupy fellow Provincetown painters from Charles Webster Hawthorne to Paul Resika. Ken Johnson, in the New York Times, describes the conceptual underpinnings of de Groot’s paintings as, “part Zen, part American Transcendentalist, part Modernist formalist. Contradicting the horizontal expanse of conventional seascape painting, Ms. De Groot’s works have a blocky presence that calls to mind Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin.” Her telescopic gaze of the endless horizon, sky, and sea, conveys a humble observational relationality with ever-changing natural forces.
The exhibition’s title, Sea Smoke, derives from the rare phenomenon of a fog formed from the interaction of cold air sweeping over warm water. [1] The “smoke,” a term which connotes fire, heat, and aridness, is paradoxically water vapor—moist, visible gas at once transparent and opaque. The singularity of sea smoke finds a parallel with the contradictions of de Groot herself, who eschewed the life of a well-connected New York socialite in favor of that of an artist at Land’s End. Generous, but often inscrutable, de Groot lived and painted in synchronicity with the rhythms of the environment—the seasonal changes of light; the movement of clouds across the sky; the sonic silence or violence of the wind and waves. She wrote:
I have an intense connection to this place and to the natural world. If I can convey that connection through my painting, then people who see those paintings can also connect and see for themselves what I see. When they see something in a painting—birds or the horizon—then they tend to pay more attention when confronted with the reality. The recognition is the spark. Or, if the painting is any good, it should continue to give off some of the magic that inspired it.
Applying pigment with a palette knife, de Groot captures the dizzying whiteout conditions of snowstorms by obliterating a horizon line in a powdery haze. Horizontal bands of gray and white clouds rhyme with the cold flatness of cement-tinted waters on an overcast, windless day. The sea expands to nearly the top of the panel in another painting; its deep navy surface glistens and shimmers beneath a radiant moon from behind the viewer’s left shoulder. Like musical notes, the horizon lines shift across the panels, sharing new secrets about the place where land, sea, and sky meet at the end of Cape Cod. Sea Smoke includes works that predate her arrival at the 12 x 11-inch format to illustrate the compositional progressions of her painting practice in their variation of size, orientation, and application of pigment.
De Groot began her so-called “horizon paintings,” for which she is best known, in the 1990s after decades working as an award-winning book designer and experimenting with India ink on paper. The exhibition includes examples of her book covers; their bold, abstract graphics and acidic colors reflect the popular design sensibilities of the 1960s and early 1970s. Also on view are contemporaneous psychedelic drawings she dubbed “rapidiograph doodle drawings.” Fractal and kaleidoscopic patterns meander organically across the paper recalling, at times, microscopic cellular organisms or fantastical architectural and urban spaces.
In the 1970s, de Groot wanted to draw more from observation and began making hundreds of calligraphic drawings of seagulls and black ducks that she studied from her rear deck. Composed with a blunt bamboo stick and India ink kept warm on a sterno stove, these drawings were inspired by her interest in Buddhism and Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginners Mind (1970). She observed, “I was making marks with birds and light and water and India ink, teaching my hand to translate the movement of what I was seeing on to paper as it happened. I was hugely impressed with Japanese and Chinese art—Hokusai and Bada Shanren and others.” Eager to study closely the black cormorants who roosted on the harbor’s breakwater, de Groot transformed her kayak into a floating studio and outfitted it to keep the rocking to a minimum as she transcribed their long, graceful necks; distinctive hooked beaks; and broad wings with laundry markers. “[E]ach profile worthy of a Hapsburg prince,” observed longtime friend Philip Hoare of these drawings. De Groot drew the cormorants for six hours each day from September through November and then spent months assembling them into groups. Sea Smoke includes one of her gridded installations of these drawings.
On Wednesday, December 4, at 6:30pm, NYSS will host a virtual conversation on Pat de Groot’s life and work. Curator Kara Carmack will be joined by artists Richard Baker, Paul Bowen, Georgia Marsh, and Helen Miranda Wilson. Register to join by visiting nyss.org/lectures
We are grateful to Dean and Carren Shulman and Kevin Rita for their generous support of the exhibition. We also extend a special thank you to de Groot’s many dedicated friends, the lenders to the exhibition, and the staff at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, especially Madeleine Larson, for helping to realize this presentation. An exhibition catalogue is forthcoming in 2025.
Book designer and artist Pat de Groot (b. 1930, London; d. 2018, Cape Cod) was born to a British landed-gentry father and an American socialite descended from Isidor Straus, the co-owner of Macy’s. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, she briefly moved to Paris to work with George Plimpton on his new literary magazine Paris Review. Back in New York, she apprenticed with the acclaimed book designer Marhall Lee at H. Wolff Book Manufacturing Company, where she designed books for Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Random House, and others, before going freelance in 1958. Some of her titles include Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) and Charlie Chaplin, Jr.’s My Father, Charlie Chaplin (1960), which won one of the 50 Best Designed Books of the Year Award, sponsored by The American Institute of Graphic Arts.
In 1958, she married painter Nanno de Groot, and, in 1963, they moved into a house they designed and built on the shore of Provincetown Harbor. Unfortunately, Nanno died of lung cancer a few months later, but the rambling house became a nucleus for artists, writers, and musicians in Provincetown. Over the subsequent decades, she hosted or housed artists such as Eric Aho, Richard Baker, Paul Bowen, Gandy Brodie, Georgia Marsh, Bob Thompson, John Waters, and Helen Miranda Wilson; musicians Elvin Jones and Nina Simone; and writers Philip Hoare, Major Jackson, and Mary Oliver. The “doyenne of the dunes” was often seen walking barefoot through Provincetown accompanied by her part-wolf dog, kayaking in the Harbor, sunbathing nude on the beaches, playing bongos at the local jazz club, and hosting dinners made with ingredients from her lush vegetable garden.
De Groot served as president of the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA (1992–ca. 1996), and president of the Provincetown Group Gallery (1988–1993). Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Provincetown Art Association and Museum, MA; Albert Merola Gallery, Provincetown, MA; Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NY; Cherrystone Gallery, Wellfleet, MA; Pat Hearn Gallery, NY; Julie Heller Gallery, Provincetown, MA, among others. Her awards include the Lee Krasner Award from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2007); Purchase Prize, American Academy of Arts & Letters, New York (2004); and Artist Award, Anonymous Was A Woman (2002). Her works are in the permanent collections of DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; Kresge Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI; M.I.T. List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; and Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, MA.
[1] De Groot also titled several of her paintings Sea Smoke.
