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Large Works by Philip Malicoat

Provincetown Art Association and Museum

By: - May 20, 2022

 

PROVINCETOWN, MA: Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) is pleased to present Philip Malicoat: Large Works. On view June 10 - July 24, the exhibition is curated by two of the artist's granddaughters, Breon Dunigan and Robena Malicoat. The public is invited to an opening reception on Friday, June 10 from 6-8pm. 

 

Philip Malicoat was part of a large family of Provincetown artists spanning multiple generations dating back to the early 1900s. Considered the family's patriarch, Philip Cecil Malicoat was a child of farmers with little exposure to the arts, first in Oklahoma, then in Indiana, before coming to Provincetown in 1929 to study with Charles Hawthorne. Malicoat went on to build a life in Provincetown, meeting his wife, the artist Barbara Haven Brown, and together raising two children, Martha and Conrad, both of whom became accomplished artists. Malicoat was active in Provincetown arts community as a member of the Provincetown Art Association and Beachcomber's Club, a teacher, a painter, and, in 1968, a co-founder of the Fine Arts Work Center.

 

Maura Coughlin’s writes in her essay, Immersed in Half-Light: "Malicoat’s landscape paintings, like those of his good friend Edwin Dickinson, offer sensory encounters: in the nacreous grays of Provincetown’s silvery mists, and dense, wet fogs we experience the temperature, breeze and humidity of the place. The severe blankness and obscurity of the back shore — whether stormy or still — speaks of somatic absorption, of walking and inhabiting the shoreline and knowing it viscerally.

 

Unlike his generally smaller landscapes, Malicoat’s large figure paintings have remained in his family and are likely a surprising discovery for the many viewers of this exhibition. The enigmatic narratives of these studio paintings plumb the potential of still life and figural assemblages to convey symbolic gravity or allegory, and they take various approaches to the personhood of represented figures."