One of the great things about Franklin County is that, although we’ve got our own thriving arts scene right here, we’re also within easy driving distance to other areas that are rich in music, theater and visual arts. Hit the road after breakfast and you can make the roughly three-and-a half- or four-hour drive to Provincetown in time for lunch.
The seaside town at the tip of Cape Cod has been an arts destination since the late 1800s, when painter Charles Hawthorne started a painting school in Provincetown in 1899.
“He’s the guy that really set the starting line,” Provincetown artist Bill Evaul says of Hawthorne.
Evaul, who continues a hundred-year Provincetown tradition of the white-line block print, often called “The Provincetown print,” sat down with me in his Commercial Street gallery and gave me a crash course in P-town history.
“We’ll start at the very beginning, the Indians used to live here,” Evaul says.
Even then, Provincetown was a summer resort, he adds, “Because in the winter they moved into the heavy woodlands out toward you, where there was more protection, more game. But in the summer they came down here just like everybody to have a giant clambake.”
Artifacts left behind show that in addition to hunting and fishing, the indigenous people were creating things, Evaul says.
“Fast forward to the shipping era,” Evaul says, “when there was a tradition in America of itinerant artists.”
These 19th-century artists would travel from town to town, painting portraits of ships and family portraits of the upper middle class. Provincetown, with its active harbor, could support a few artists who worked year-round, Evaul says. And then Hawthorne’s school brought an influx of painters, including John Noble, Ambrose Webster and Richard Miller.
The start of World War I in 1914 sent expat- Americans who’d been living in Europe flooding back to the States, often bringing European friends with them.
“Literally hundreds and hundreds of them came to Provincetown,” Evaul says.
In this first decade of the 20th century, things began to coalesce quickly among Provincetown’s artists. In 1914, the Provincetown Arts Association and Museum was formed, and in 1915, a Swedish- American named Bror Julius Olsson Nordfelt came to the area and, along with other artists, began developing the white-line woodcut.
“He came here in 1915 and never left,” Evaul says of Nordfelt.
“I heard that’s how you got here, too,” I say.
Evaul laughs. “Yeah! We’ll get there.”
Right now we’re still in 1915: Nordfelt and a group of other printmakers including Ethel Mars, Blanche Lazzell, Maud Hunt Squire, Mildren McMillen and Ada Gilmore, set up what Evaul called a “think-tank cauldron,” where they spent all winter experimenting with the single-block method.
By 1916, playwright Eugene O’Neill had shown up “with his trunk full of plays that have never been produced” and the newly formed Provincetown Players debuted some of his work. Two social clubs for artists, The Beachcomber’s Club for men and the Sail Loft Club for women, were formed.
“Everything’s kind of in full flower,” Evaul says.
So much so that The Boston Globe runs a front-page story declaring: “Biggest Art Colony in the World in Provincetown.”
“Marsden Hartley (a Modernist painter from Maine) had the best time of his life that year and always wrote about the great Provincetown summer of 1916,” Evaul says. “And so, yah, we’re recreating it with the great summer of 2016.”
Which makes this summer a great time to head to Provincetown. Evaul says there will be theatrical productions, exhibits and other events all summer long. He’ll be taking part in some staged readings of Eugene O’Neill plays at the Provincetown Public Library, playing some of the same roles that Nordfelt used to play.
Which brings us back to white-line woodblock printing.
Evaul tells me that in traditional woodcut, a block has to be carved for each color and the paper printed multiple times to create the final print. Registration can be tricky.
In white-line printing, all of the elements of the composition are carved onto the same block, with areas for the different colors divided by thin grooves to keep them separate. These grooves are what cause the distinctive white outlines in the print. The paper is tacked to the edge of the block to maintain accurate registration between applications of colors.
“You paint one area at a time, and you only go as far as you think it’s going to stay wet,” Evaul says. “You lay the paper down and rub it, and then you pull the paper back up. And now you do the next little spot of color. It’s freakin’ tedious!”
He laughs.
“And that’s why it probably died out. Because it could take longer to make one of these than to make a standard oil painting.”
Why does he bother? Is it partly the historical aspect of it?
Evaul shakes his head.
“I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t love it for its own medium and love it for the things that I can do with it,” he says. “I’ve taken it way further than anybody ever did before. I’ve left them all in the dust. I mean, really, I have. And there’s a reason for it. I’ve been working at it since 1981. Most of these artists only did them for five years, eight years.
“Blanche, yeah, she did it for her whole life — Blanche Lazzell. But I’ve already cut more blocks and pulled more prints than she has. And I’m still going.”
Evaul says he’s carved close to 300 blocks. He doesn’t have an assistant but he’s starting to think about it.
Oh, and how he got to Provincetown — one night when Evaul was an art student at Syracuse University, a friend said to him, “You know, if we leave right now, we could watch the sun rise in Provincetown.”
Everybody else said, “What? You’re nuts.”
Evaul said, “Let’s go!”
At the end of the semester, at the suggestion of some of the people he’d met down in Provincetown, Evaul applied for a seven-month residency at the Fine Arts Work Center, which he received. The residency included a place to live, a studio and a small stipend. Evaul borrowed his grandmother’s brand new Buick and drove it from New Jersey to Provincetown to begin the residency in October. That was 1970.
Evaul’s been here ever since.
Where to see it
Find Bill Evaul Studio and Gallery at 347 Commercial St., Provincetown. Contact: 508-237-3080. Search for “Evaul Studio and Gallery” on Facebook; visit his website at: www.evaul.com; or watch a demo of Evaul making a white line print at: vimeo.com/124931989.
See the “The Great Provincetown Summer: 1916” exhibition at the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum, 1 High Pole Hill Road, Provincetown, now through Nov. 20. For more information, including hours and directions, visit: www.pilgrim-monument.org
To find out what’s going on in Provincetown, visit: ptownchamber.com/calendar-of-events
Trish Crapo is a writer and photographer who lives in Leyden. Crapo is seeking artists and performers for her column. She can be reached at: tcrapo@me.com