The Marion Art Center (MAC) has always been a place where artists’ works of visual and performing arts could be enjoyed without having to travel to Boston or Providence for a grand cultural experience. This summer season has found the walls of the two petite galleries graced by paintings and photography from a variety of artists with diverse backgrounds and vision. It is without a doubt a community art center that continues to grow and glow. It is also a place where celebrating artists and their contributions grants us immediate access to the wonders of visual arts.
Adding to the list of truly wonderful exhibitions are the paintings currently on display by Nancy Dyer Mitton and Robert Seyffert. The doors opened to this newest exhibit on August 16 and will be open through September 28.
Mitton, whose roots run deep in Marion, has been a driving force at the MAC for decades, including being the chairman of exhibits in the past. But Mitton is an artist, first and foremost.
“I used to paint interior scenes,” said Mitton.
One can surmise that painting rooms, the rugs, furnishings, and décor as selected and arranged by the inhabitant is almost as personal as painting a nude. The artist is invited to experience the private lives of others through painting their living spaces and then opening those spaces up to a wider audience. It’s intimate and candid in a way other modes of expression cannot achieve.
More recently, Mitton has turned to the panorama offered by sea and sky.
“Nature inspires. … For the past ten years, I’ve focused on the expansiveness of water and sky,” she said. Her paintings of horizons, seascapes, storms, and dawns are vast canvasses that ask the visitor to enter a realm where color starts in nature and then intensifies into explosive imagination. Bright oranges, blues, and greens delight the eye and capture prisms of color imagined by Mitton and executed with precision.
The second-floor gallery gives the larger Mitton paintings room to breathe, to let the colors move as if being blown or floating on sea air. The gallery allows you to stand back and be absorbed by the color.
On the first floor, you could almost hear the roar of automobile engines, feel the heat rising up from the city pavement, see the sparkle of chrome as the cars of our youth rolled down the street. Seyffert’s singularly themed exhibit, the American Automobile in the City, transcends the car as a manmade convenience to industrial strength works of art.
Seyffert also has deep roots, but his are from a family tree populated with artists. An uncle and grandfather in his lineage are well-known artists in their own right. One could say he comes by his talent naturally. But honing one’s organic gifts takes discipline and dedication, both fully on display in this collection of paintings.
“I wanted to paint city scenes, but you can’t get away from the cars,” Seyffert said. So he imagined the street scenes with vintage cars, “The cars of my youth … [because] modern cars aren’t that interesting.”
Amen to that.
Seyffert’s cars are classics and his technique is one that fills the canvasses with bold color, storefronts that frame the vehicles in the center or foreground of the space, and the glint from massive chrome venders comes strikingly to the eye. These canvases are large slices of twentieth-century life when our love of the automobile ran high. They are nostalgic and transporting. The car is both a romantic motif and a social statement and Seyffert’s paintings inform us of both sentiments.
These two artists brought out a very large crowd filling the two galleries to near capacity. While the first floor flooded with well-wishers and those eager to view the paintings, the second-floor gallery was one solid party.
As the visitors took in the works of art, Steve Piazza played the piano infusing the event with jazz standards like Luck Be A Lady Tonight. But luck wasn’t needed, you just had to be there in that joyous cacophony to know you were experiencing a happening, one that brought together artists with art lovers, music, and a glorious summer’s evening – a moment of perfection. That’s what the Marion Art Center brings to the community.
Mitton and Seyffert’s exhibits are, simply put, a must-see. No traveling required. Within minutes you can be viewing works of art equal to any found in metropolitan areas, right here in your own backyard.
Seyffert will be returning to the MAC on September 28 at 11:00 am to give an artist talk, and Mitton’s son, David, will be performing with his jazz ensemble, The David Mitton Project, on Saturday September 14, at 7:30 pm. Visit www.marionartcenter.org for complete details.
Marion Art Center
By Marilou Newell