Thomas B. Higham Retrospective at Cahoon Museum

Tuesday, 30 May 2006 10:36

Cotuit, MA - “Past Perfect: The Landscapes of Thomas B. Higham” will run through June 25 at the Cahoon Museum of American Art.  As a retrospective, this exhibition of more than 30 works looks back on more than two decades of a well-known Cape artist’s career.  Thomas Higham’s paintings themselves look back in time, giving us glimpses of an unspoiled Cape Cod, such as the artist remembers from growing up in Osterville in the ’50s and ’60s.

Higham’s acrylic and watercolor scenes belong to the here and now, but contain vintage buildings and boats and pristine shorelines, marshes and meadows.  More often than not, Higham has found ample inspiration within his native Barnstable’s town lines. “Past Perfect” includes paintings of the Centerville and Bumps rivers, Ropes’ Barn in Cotuit, West Parish Church and the old Jenkins’ farm in West Barnstable, Crosby Yacht Yard in Osterville, Maraspin Creek in Barnstable village and a cranberry bog in Marstons Mills.

“Tom has a special talent for bringing back the way Cape Cod never was, but we all think it used to be,” says Julian Baird, the president of Tree’s Place Gallery in Orleans, which has carried Higham’s work for 20 years.  “The sun is shining at exactly the right angle.  The flowers are open just the right amount.  Everything is perfect, but it doesn’t look hokey.”

Higham saw an exhibition of Andrew Wyeth’s work at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston while he was in high school and immediately thought, “This is how I respond to the world.”  Like Wyeth, he employs a pared-down Yankee realism that quietly draws us into a scene, making us imagine how it feels, smells and sounds, as well as how it looks.  With a silvery light, subtle tonalities and uncompromising honesty, he creates a barebones visual poetry that stirs feelings of nostalgia. Higham’s style – like the subjects he chooses to paint – has changed little over the years.  “Past Perfect” is a retrospective marked more by consistency than change.

Higham, who is distantly related to Harwich artist Charles D. Cahoon (1861-1951), has never had trouble selling his work.  While still in high school, he had his first show at Osterville Free Library and sold three paintings.  Later, he majored in painting at the Swain School of Design in New Bedford, receiving his BFA in 1977.  For a few years, he made his living primarily through woodworking and carpentry, but around 1993 committed himself to painting. 

Julian Baird recalls that Higham’s first two shows at Tree’s Place sold out.  One year, when the artist asked the gallery to refrain from pre-selling his work, Baird found 45 to 50 people waiting by the front door when he and his wife arrived to open the gallery on the first morning of Higham’s show.  They gave people numbers and let them in one at a time, with only one purchase allowed per customer.  “When we got through with that process, all but one painting had sold, and we sold it the night of the opening,” Baird recalls.

Visit The Cahoon Museum of American Art at : http://www.cahoonmuseum.org/