Expanding Horizons

Provincetown artist Pat de Groot first focused on birds, and she used a kayak as her studio. Later, she moved indoors to paint the larger world of sky and water.

By John Skoyles, 10/19/2003

Pat de Groot has painted only one subject for the past 10 years: the horizon -- the meeting of the sky and sea as it appears outside the window of her ramshackle house on Provincetown Harbor. In its infinite variety, this view has provided her with an infinite source of inspiration.

"Everything I've done comes from what I see out those windows," she says as she leans toward the five big double-hungs that overlook the harbor.

What accounts for the power of these paintings? Perhaps that so much is compressed into so small a space. Each piece, slightly larger than a sheet of paper, reflects the moods of the sea, the mist, the rhythms of the clouds, and the constant interaction of these elements. As de Groot says, "There are all kinds of days, from dense fog to blinding dazzle to blizzard to all gray -- each day a new experience."

The horizon paintings have brought national recognition. De Groot's lifetime commitment to art, which took her from ink to oil, from black and white to color, from improvised tools to the palette knife, has yielded this current work of force and grace. It's been a long process, one she has trusted, but de Groot's story is not about the passage of time, it's about art, survival, and going your own way.

She has only recently attracted widespread attention. The New York Times praised her "delicately atmospheric seascapes," saying they "exude a concentrated sense of spiritual and aesthetic purpose."

Last year, she received two prestigious grants, and enthusiastic articles about her work have appeared in major journals. From November 13 to 16, her work can be seen at the Boston International Fine Art Show at the Boston Center for the Arts Cyclorama, where she will be represented by the Albert Merola Gallery of Provincetown.

All this at age 73.

You approach her house through a large garden. A covered woodshed stands to one side, filled with cords of oak, her main source of winter heat. Lettuce, spinach, kale, and tomatoes crowd the yard in summer, as well as explosions of tulips, peonies, and clematis. A compost heap smolders in a corner. A plaque on the door frame quoting the haiku poet Ryoto greets visitors: "Yield to the willow / All the loathing, / All the desire of your heart."

The downstairs is divided into three big rooms: living area, kitchen, and studio. The kitchen has a 5-foot silver dollar jade plant on one side and a night-blooming cereus of equal height on the other. Four cats lounge around the rough-hewn table. Her studio, next to the kitchen, is 30 feet from the beach. Those walls are lit with paintings of the horizon, some still in progress.

Kayaks hang from the ceiling, stored for winter. But something else is tied to the studio rafters -- a 6-foot-long hammock of white plastic that looms above a table of oil paints. And next to it, a bucket on a hoist. What is it? A device de Groot invented to catch water from the leaky roof, and a way to empty it. When the hammock fills with rainwater, she drops the bucket into it, then empties the water outside on the beach.

Pat de Groot is a figure of single-mindedness, self-sufficiency, and passion. Her house reflects her life; the place is so dense with art that it is possible to overlook even a 6-foot wooden sculpture. Paintings line the walls -- gifts from artist friends Richard Baker, Paul Bowen, Robert Henry -- and statues of Buddha sit throughout the rooms. There's a Tibetan eye chart, as well as tiny African sculptures of musicians, which are fixed to the frames of windows that face Cape Cod Bay. The conga drums in the living room, the hundreds of worn record albums, the library, the 9-foot ceilings with their rough beams, all combine to invite the visitor to a life fully lived.

While new to the larger world of art, de Groot is well known in Provincetown. She can often be seen walking the beach with her 11-year-old dog, Atisha, and paddling her kayak around the bay. Conga-drum player, jazz devotee, Buddhist, de Groot also holds a black belt in kempo karate and has been a student of tai chi for a decade.

For years, she played drums with Magic and the Reggae Stars, as well as with two jazz groups, at venues up and down the Cape. She has served as president of the Provincetown Group Gallery and of the Fine Arts Work Center, where she raised more than $150,000 for named fellowships to honor the late artists Myron Stout and Milton Avery.

De Groot is a small, energetic woman with a walk so purposeful and intent, one can't help notice her as she makes her way across a room. Perhaps this stride comes from years of hiking over the dunes. She has adapted so well to that rugged landscape that when she returns to town, she retains the persistent, dogged rhythm of the dune climber.

Anyone familiar with this art colony will immediately recognize her crowded, jumbled rooms as "old Provincetown," where the life of art was more important than real estate, a place where those who made their living from the sea joined those who painted it, eating and drinking together at places like Cookie's Tap and the Fo'c'sle.

Richard Baker, the still-life painter who worked for years in de Groot's upstairs studio, recalls hearing her rush to the beach one afternoon, the screen door slamming with such force that it knocked his palette to the floor. Outside, he saw a gull holding a big sea bass and de Groot chasing it off, grabbing the flapping fish for Baker to paint. Later, he remembers, she cooked the fish with herbs and vegetables from her garden.

An acquaintance of de Groot's once remarked that he had never been to a bad party at her place -- there's an immediate intimacy when you enter. In winter, warmth blazes from the hip-high fireplace that divides the kitchen and living room. In summer, guests sit on the deck before the sea and sky.

One memorable event was poet Stanley Kunitz's 90th birthday party some years ago. At another, given to celebrate the Albert Merola Gallery's 2002 summer season, which included shows by de Groot, painters Jim Balla and Fritz Bultman, and filmmaker/photographer John Waters, de Groot served only frozen margaritas, made with the most expensive tequila -- nothing else. The limited selection fueled and ensured the high spirits of her guests.

When she was in her 20s, de Groot moved to Paris and worked for The Paris Review. Returning to the States a few years later, she lived in New York and was taken on as an apprentice to the renowned book designer Marshall Lee. She had a successful career in that field, making a name for herself at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Random House. Her work included producing covers for the books of several Nobel Prize winners, including T. S. Eliot, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Derek Walcott, and Elie Wiesel.

Her life has not been without its losses, however. In 1958, de Groot married the painter Nanno de Groot, a member of the New York abstract expressionist group that frequented the Cedar Street Tavern. They moved to Provincetown and built the house on the water in 1962, but Nanno died a year later. To honor his memory and their love, Pat designed Nanno's gravestone from a piece of marble that she chose and cut herself. This imposing abstract female figure stands on his grave in the Provincetown cemetery. Pat has lived alone in the house since, and her late husband's strong presence is still felt there through the huge oil paintings that dominate its walls.

It was after Nanno's death that Pat de Groot made her first drawings, attracted to the birds outside her window. The vibrant and fluid movements she captured are in contrast to the more structured confines of the world of design. She modestly calls her path to art "my awkward journey." But one thing is certain -- the boldness and artistic freedom she experienced when she stepped into what was then Nanno's studio on the water and began to draw the seagulls and ducks with stark, black strokes. A believer in process rather than product, de Groot made hundreds of drawings.

She worked this way until the '70s, when a change in the harbor brought about a change in her work: De Groot's kayak became her studio.

In 1972, the town built a breakwater, a protective wall of rocks soon settled by flocks of cormorants. De Groot became fascinated with these huge birds, whose long sinuous necks and brilliant shining eyes are reminiscent of flying pterodactyls. She paddled close to the birds and drew them each fall, weather permitting, for six hours a day. She learned to hold a pair of binoculars in one hand and draw with the other, having rigged the kayak to tie up to lobster buoys to prevent drift.

Again, she produced massive amounts of drawings, putting them aside until after Thanksgiving, when she would choose what to show the next summer.

She worked like this every autumn for 13 years, moving back inside in December, where she began to use the boxes of Nanno's oils that were still stored in the house. In the winter, using a tube of paint as both medium and implement, she drew black ducks, light, and water. She squeezed paint onto paper and made her marks with the tube itself, so the birds seemed both realistic and calligraphic. Eventually, squeezing the tubes put such a strain on the tendons in her wrist that she was forced to give it up and reinvent her process.

This is when de Groot began a larger subject -- the horizon, which has been her focus since 1993. The variety of these scenes is astounding. Art critics have praised "the sensual reality of both the world and the paint" and the range of emotion from "invigorating joy to inescapable sadness." In paintings done on a clear day, the viewer stands at the edge of the world, the future bright. In times of dense mist, the horizon vanishes, and suddenly you are in jeopardy of losing your way. A night painting shows the moon casting a silver path, as if a light has been switched on over the dark water.

How is it that the static seascape in each of these paintings keeps changing even as we stand before them? The poet and critic John Yau has commented that this phenomenon in her work makes us feel that we "greet and bid farewell to every moment."

Once an influential art colony, Provincetown still retains strong traces of its past. The Provincetown Art Association and Museum regularly offers student-curated shows, in which children select art from the permanent collection, which is then shown in a formal exhibition.

Last spring, Kayla Duarte, of the Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School, chose de Groot's Fog, Sea and Sand for her school's exhibit. She wrote in the catalog: "This painting makes me feel like the whole world stopped moving and that everything is going to end, or just begin again."

These paintings heighten our sense of mortality, so that even the youngest among us can appreciate the fragility of existence as well as the possibility of rebirth. Just when we feel we know where we are, just when we are certain we can comprehend the future, its course changes dramatically.

John Skoyles teaches at Emerson College. His book, Secret Frequencies: A New York Education, has just been published by the University of Nebraska Press.