Edwin Rissland: Revisitations

Please join for a Fredi Schiff Levin Lecture with the curator and the artist’s daughter, Edwina Rissland, on Thursday, July 9 at 6pm. Included with $15 Museum admission, free for PAAM members.

Revisitations presents a long view of Provincetown captured through the eyes of the painter Edwin Ertel Rissland (1907-2001) with works from over six decades – 1930 to 1997. 

Edwin E. Rissland first came to Provincetown at the age of twenty-three to study painting at the summer school run by George Elmer Browne. He returned nearly every summer thereafter and, in over more than sixty years, explored and painted scenes throughout the town and its surrounding landscape. In those early summers, he came to know Provincetown intimately—from the harbor and tidal flats to the moors, dunes, and hills beyond Bradford Street. Certain places—the harbor, Shank Painter Pond, and the West End—became enduring subjects in his work. Some of these landscapes have since changed or disappeared, while others remain much as they were.

Rissland worked in a wide range of media, including oil, watercolor, and resist techniques, and also practiced lithography, sculpture, and life figure drawing. Though he lived, worked, and studied primarily in the New Jersey–New York area, his heart was firmly anchored in Provincetown, his beloved and abiding source of inspiration. This exhibition explores a lifetime of painting a place that is always changing, yet ever the same.

The Resist Technique

In ink resists, one essentially paints in reverse: if an area is to be black, it is not masked, and if it is to be white, it is masked so that it can ‘resist’ the India ink that will be applied to cover the whole piece and then washed off. For instance, to create a fine black line, a narrow line is left unmasked. The masking is done with gouaches. Gouaches with different porosity create gradation in the resist and brushwork creates different textures, for instance for skies. 

Rissland was a master of the resist technique and did a large number, especially during the 1960s. He would start in the morning and apply the coat of India ink just before lunch; in the afternoon, he’d wash off the ink—the family waiting to see how it came out—and let the piece dry. Then it was time for a swim at New Beach (Herring Cove) for him and his wife Fae and back to the WERC for his daughter Edwina. On following days, he would paint the resist with watercolors and sometimes finish it with a coat of rubbed wax.

His ink resist/watercolors capture many essentials of Provincetown life: the old Cold Storage, Flyer’s Boat Yard, the flats and the traps (fishing weirs), draggers at MacMillan Wharf, the breakwater and moors, the so-called Monkey House near the Provincetown Inn, sailboat races at the WERC, Shankpainter Pond and areas back of Bradford. He also painted other favorite places like Pamet Harbor in Truro.

Excerpted from the Curator’s Statement

There are many folks in town who will be able to identify the locations Rissland chose to paint, comparing them to the current views. There will be some who have memories of those who lived in many of the houses while he was painting in Provincetown and there are those who live in them now who will appreciate his unique ability of portraying the town.

He was a very accurate observer, and he painted with a great passion. It is evident that he was very interested in catching the mood of each day he spent in his beloved town. His work captured the weather, the time of day, and the season with color and mark-making, depending on his medium for a scene that he chose to represent over and over again..

Little did I know I would be reviewing 70 years of drawing, printmaking, painting in oils and acrylics, and sculpture made by the same hands and executed with such perfection and dedication to detail. After the first day — hours spent viewing images — I especially enjoyed learning about his resist method that I found fascinating and that was completely new to me.

Image: Edwin Rissland (1907-2001), Main Pier in Storm, 1953, oil