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arts
‘Honest to Bristol’
Willy Heeks’ luminous abstract paintings
reflect the coastal town where he grew up
BY ALEXANDER CASTRO
@CastroDaJourno
Part of ‘Verduno,’
2014, on loan
from a private
collection.
‘Intuition,’
Willy Heeks,
oil and acrylic
on canvas, 2008
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“A world has
to emerge …
Your painting
language can
come from a
deep place,” says
artist Willy Heeks at
the Bristol Art Museum.
PHOTOS BY DAVE HANSEN
842-0208
E-mail:[email protected]
JUNE 8-14, 2016
Paintings and works on paper by Willy Heeks
Through July 10 | Bristol Art Museum
10 Wardwell St., Bristol
(401) 253-4400 | www.bristolartmuseum.org
explosive touch. “Painting is like
finding something,” Heeks says. In
Bristol, he recovers the fragmented
feelings of days past, painting them
with an acuity that can only be
gleaned from experience.
Heeks knows the importance of
the origin story. He understands
that, for the ambitious young
person, Bristol has a quietude charged with potential. This muse is finite,
but its influence can
reawaken over time.
“Bristol in Mind” revisits the incubator
of Heeks’ art. A genesis is retold in a room
that broadcasts the
sound of sea. The story’s subsequent chapters
adorn the walls as paintings, the products
of a Bristol
boy who
ventured
far, and
returned
to tell
the tale.
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THROUGHOUT the SOUTH COAST
mercury page 12-13
‘BRISTOL IN MIND’
It’s best that you visit Willy Heeks’
new exhibit on a quiet day. In an
uncrowded gallery, you can hear
the sound of a gently crashing tide,
drifting from a burlap-covered, hayfilled wheelbarrow.
“It has the ocean, it has the farm,”
Heeks says of the installation, an
homage to his youth on Bristol farmland. A noisy and densely packed
opening night deprived some visitors of this evocative soundtrack.
Heeks had asked guests, “Did you
hear the wheelbarrow?”
You can hear Heeks’ score — and,
more importantly, see his tremendous abstractions — in “Bristol in
Mind,” on view through July 10 at
Bristol Art Museum. Especially
suited to the venue, the exhibit collects Heeks’ nonliteral interpretations of the suburban seaport.
Heeks intended to show all new
work, but he eventually decided to
corral a handful of older paintings,
including some from Rhody-based
collections, to complement the
newer stuff.
“I wanted to do it right,” he explains. “Something that was honest.
Honest to Bristol.”
That honesty required showing
work like 2000’s “Farm Drawings,”
which “tribute … all the shapes
and forms” Heeks remembers both
faintly and vividly from farms like
Paganos and Colt. Contrary to the
usual, exaggerated narratives, time
spent in foster care did not cast a
permanent gloom over Heeks’ life.
In 1973, he relinquished his van,
his dog and a girlfriend to move
to New York and attend a rigorous independent study program at
the Whitney Museum of American Art. He developed an Abstract
Expressionist style that forewent
spiritual braggadocio for systematic depth. As Barry Schwabsky
wrote in a 1994 catalog essay, Heeks
paints “complex abstraction that
resembles, without imitating, life.”
Heeks says, “A world has to emerge
… Your painting language can come
from a deep place.”
For Heeks that hidden place is
Bristol, and the museum’s smaller
gallery is dedicated to his formative
years. The wheelbarrow is there, as
is Heeks’ juvenilia, resurrected via
photocopy. Newspaper clippings of
past coverage gather aside his neatly
handwritten recollections of Bristol:
“The scent of the bay, the soil, animals, boats, trees, oh, and the parade
and carnival!” It’s the closest Heeks
gets to unadulterated sentiment.
This nostalgic glance could be misconstrued as provincial, but it appears more like a sincere and thankful recognition of one’s roots.
After all, Bristol introduced Heeks
to Emile Ferrara, his high school art
teacher and longtime friend. Heeks
remembers transferring into Ferrara’s art class in 10th grade: “Emile
asked me if I’d like to learn how
to draw, which I thought I knew already.” Before Bristol, at the Providence Children’s Center, Heeks was
often instructed to “kill time by drawing.” Ferrara guided this nascent talent. Weekends meant no art class, so
Ferrara suggested Heeks make fiveminute drawings of farm life and
livestock. Sixteen years ago, the two
friends exhibited together at Bristol
Art Museum. Ferrara’s own art is
absent this time around, but he appears in photographs beside Heeks.
These mementos of mentorship trace
Heeks’ development on personal,
rather than art historical, terms.
Despite the intriguing shape and
content of Heeks’ life (including
some successes in the New York art
world), no backstory is needed to
dive into his excited, layered, and luminous paintings. His electrifying
compositions are crammed almost
to the point of gluttony. But a look
at Heeks’ teenage drawings reveals
a longstanding respect for the grace
and power of line. As a kid he drew
the Flintstones, Casper, and Scrooge
McDuck. Now his paintings are sophisticatedly cartoonish in spirit, appearing bright, elastic and fast. The
titles are carefully selected, and often
imply a want for knowledge: “The
Study,” “The Finder,” “The Journal,”
“Tell More.” “The Rose” visualizes
this curiosity, acting as a testing
ground for new shapes. Architectures of line and blobs of color awkwardly congregate, radiating playfulness. The paintings seem to ask:
“What can I be next?”
Heeks learned this “nomadic quality of shifting and adapting” in foster care. In his mature work, that
nomadism has been reincarnated
as wanderlust. He demonstrates a
heightened sensibility for transient
moods and memories, rendering
these “fleeting things” with an
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