Carmen Cicero, Lucy Clark, Danielle Mailer, Deb Mell

CARMEN CICERO  “Tales of Intrigue”

Figurative Expressionist watercolors

On view in this exhibition, will be a selection of watercolors harmonizing with a huge one-man exhibition of Carmen Cicero’s watercolors and drawings opening at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, July 3 - October 5, 2025. These exhibitions are accompanied by a major recently-published book Carmen Cicero:  Drawings and watercolors with a forward by art historian Annette Blaugrund and essay by David Ebony, art writer and contributing editor of Art in America, Yale University Press, and The Brooklyn Rail among other publications.

CARMEN CICERO is both a painter and jazz musician. Early in Cicero’s career, he achieved success as an abstract expressionist, but after a disastrous fire in his studio in 1971, where he lost everything, he moved to New York’s SoHo district and turned to a new form of expression, more storytelling and figurative expressionist. Cicero has said:  “I did not want to be a second-generation Abstract Expressionist, I wanted to be a first-generation Cicero.” 

“Carmen Cicero is a born storyteller”, notes David Ebony, Curator of the CCMOA exhibition.  “As the musician he can convey feelings and even various types of human interactions, from tense confrontations to romantic encounters, by means of a sequence of hot riffs on his saxophone or clarinet…In conversation, Cicero spins lively and comically nuanced stories of people, places, and novel situations, imparting these tales in his visual art….The images he presents are full of dramatic proposals, complex, social conundrum, and intriguing innuendo. Yet to complete the story viewers are invited to find their own way to absorb, navigate, and reflect upon the quixotic ingredients he offers.  The tale becomes the viewer’s as much as the artist’s.” 

In her Forward Carmen Cicero: An American Original, Art Historian and retired National Academy of Design Director Annette Blaugrund observes:   “Many artists use watercolor as a secondary medium, but Cicero‘s watercolors are as important as his paintings.” Continuing, Blaugrund notes: “In the hands of such 19th century American Masters as Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent and such 20th century virtuosos as John Marin and Edward Hopper, watercolor has allowed for inspired personal expression….The humorous yet sometimes disturbing figures in Cicero‘s watercolors leap off the sheet because of their effervescent watercolor hues and the fascinating enigmatic stories they tell….The images and text in this new book confirm Cicero’s enduring vitality and relevance.”

Happily, the CCMOA show emerged through the magical connections that often occur amongst passionate art collectors, the artist’s gallery, and personal visits to the artist’s studio.  A few years ago, Grace Hopkins arranged a visit to Cicero’s studio for two enthusiastic men who have returned to the gallery every year.  Loving Cicero’s work, they started looking through artist files and discovered a group of drawings Cicero had never shown.  They became so excited, that one thing led to another, and they suggested he create a book on the drawings and offered to help make it happen.   Ultimately the idea lead to the recently-published monograph Carmen Cicero’s Drawings and Watercolors: Tales of Intrigue, Danger and Humor (Abbeville Press, 2024)  that accompanies this exhibition.

“I expand on this subject,” says Walker, “to reveal yet another form of support that often emerges amongst galleries and their artists.  Galleries offer many forms of backbone support in the encouragement of the creative artist, aspects of the gallery/artist relationship that are rarely known.”  

“It’s fun to realize that as a teenager, I was “introduced” to Carmen Cicero’s jazz, because, In the summer of 1962, I believe, he’d rented a cottage near our house in Provincetown.  His sax music floated across the street to me, and I’ve never forgotten it.”  Only years later did Cicero and I actually met  in 1980. I was hired to create Graham Modern Gallery in New York. In 1984,  I was lucky to rediscover Cicero and  introduced his wild Figurative Expressionist paintings to the New York art world!

This exhibition is an exceptionally thrilling opportunity to celebrate Carmen Cicero’s extraordinary career as he will, on August 14, greet his 99th year!

LUCY CLARK “Calming Waters” 

Small oils on canvas
 

LUCY CLARK’S exhibition includes a selection of small, meditative paintings focusing on water — their underlying harmonies and dynamics of shape, atmosphere and movements.  Her current paintings reveal the motions and emotions of land and sea which the artist represents through the rhythms of line and color. 

Clark has said that she feels there are “happenings in the landscape and waters', like a mystical visit or horizon never crossed."Clark started her career as an abstract artist. "I was influenced by the heady ideas of the Washington Color School in the 70's which included such artists as Howard Mehring, Morris Louis and Alma Thomas." Clark studied drawing and painting with Allan Bridge and Joseph White.

"I first discovered Lucy Clark's art on the walls of a friends home,” notes Berta Walker. Immediately moved by the sensuous, undulating, mysterious landscapes embodying a sense of innocent discovery, I reached out to Lucy Clark to see more art, and delighted in being able to introduce her paintings as part of the gallery's "First Landings" exhibitions a few years back”

Though her home town is Washington DC, Clark has also been living part of the last 20 years in Truro, MA. In recent years her work has become directly connected to the natural environment of Cape Cod. Clark's main focus is with the elements of thelandscape which convey to her the abstracted essence of a scene both from a literal and an introspective response. The work is based on plein-air studies, memory andexploratory observations.

DANIELLE MAILER “Dream Keepers”

Mixed media sculpture and cigar boxes

DANIELLE MAILER’S exhibition will include a menagerie of freestanding aluminum cutouts including a 5’ dancer, dogs & cats, birds, and, look closely, and we’ll find a fox has joined the show fresh off the dunes.    New in Danielle Mailer’s Oeuvre are a series of repurposed cigar boxes, inviting the viewer to reflect on the passage of time and the stories embedded in everyday objects.  The juxtaposition of figures, symbols, and texture creates a dreamlike tableau — part memory, part myth — suggesting a deeper narrative beneath the surface.  Each element, creating the whole, evokes themes of legacy, cultural inheritance, and personal mythology.  Here we’re invited to peer through a window into Mailer’s layered inner world.

“Danielle Mailer’s sculptures are painterly, her paintings are sculptural, all jump with kinetic energy, vitality, seeming to inhabit a land of her own folktales, a gestalt not so much surreal as of shapeshifter’s, carrying many inner beings of the animate world, where women have bird heads and pale blue roses live within sperm whales. Danielle Mailer creates her own visionary tribe of creatures, figures and motion,” wrote Lee Roscoe in ArtScope Magazine.”

I love the absurdity of tattooing a dachshund with a painting. I like mixing and matching and making people think about what they’re seeing.  “Mailer’s work is forceful, demanding attention, yet it’s not domineering. It is positive and joyous, and it asks only that the viewer celebrate life,” sums up Cape Cod Life.

Danielle Mailer lives and works in Connecticut and spent most weekends of her life with her father, Norman Mailer, either in Brooklyn Heights, New York, or Provincetown, and thus has happily experienced the arts Provincetown-style throughout her life.   She is very involved in her CT. community and is a two-time recipient of the “Fifty Most Important People in Litchfield County,” and this winter was voted Litchfield Magazine’s “Reader’s Choice Favorite Artist of 2023.” 

DEB MELL “Storytellers”

Mixed media sculpture, paintings, watercolors

DEB MELL is a mixed-media, assemblage artist. Her current exhibition will include a selection of small wall sculptures, small paintings, and an installation  of a series of some 16 works on paper created throughout this year in response to major changes in her life. “There is something so alive, joyful, inventive, and mysterious about her work that you want to adopt it like a new pet, make it part of your family”, observed  Lee Roscoe recently in ArtScope Magazine.The audience will enjoy observing that, as  Abraham Storer in the Provincetown Independent  noted:  “Mell’s approach to art making is holistic.  Just about everything in her orbit spills into her art.”

“With her dry wit,’ observed Susan Rand Brown in Art New England, “Deb Mell’s three-dimensional pieces and her collaged paintings grab your attention:  they transform a space by sheer gumption and, ultimately, the art-historical sophistication of their effect. All of the artwork is festooned with whimsical details that have been culled from a mélange of creatures inhabiting sea, sky and land,  It can conjure ancient spirits while playfully inviting serious reflection…. She is a master of fabrication techniques.”Deb Mell discusses her painstaking additive process, where beads, buttons, sequins, paint, natural objects and more meld in dazzling intricacy. “There is nothing I won't use. I think of the stuff I use as 'my palette’.”

"Mell's art defies easy categorization,” continues Lee Roscoe in ArtScope Magazine.  “(The sculptures) are part sci-fi, part figures from ‘primitive’ mythology, part cartoon, always humorous, slightly macabre, surreal, offbeat.  Deb Mell’s mixed media paintings and sculptures are wildly unique totemic Chimeras…. As you’re viewing, you will wonder,  and want to know, the sources of Deb Mell’s inspiration….She shows us that if we are wise and alert, we will never leave our imagination behind.”