Mapping The Cliff Walk: The Power of Place as Creative Catalyst

Elliot Bostwick Davis, Ph.D. Former Director and CEO, Norton Museum of Art ​

 

Inspired by American art’s most historic slice of the Maine coast, Stewart’s colorful and intimate explorations of The Cliff Walk on Prouts Neck speak to the power of place as a creative catalyst. Inspired by visits over the course of four decades, Stewart’s landscapes run the gamut. With her matrix of smart phone images captured since 2014, she walks us through an artistic practice activated by multiple iterations of oil on canvas completed over the past year. Disorienting abstraction at the waterline ripples across Wave Fragments. Nuanced interpretations of familiar landmarks appear in Richmond from Eastern Point and South Cove. Elegiac symbolism reminiscent of Arthur Dove energizes Full Sturgeon, and layered blues in Undulation suggest a meditation on the tide. Stewart often exploits the inherent tension between her opposing approaches to abstraction and representation in a single composition such as Stratton and Bluff or Full Corn Moon, evoking a stained-glass window. Deftly blending refraction and reflection, both physical and temporal, nature and technology, Stewart’s distinctive vision of The Cliff Walk embraces the early 20th-century worlds of Winslow Homer seascapes and Cubist still-lifes through a 21st-century smart phone lens in her memorable and vivid landscapes