Brushing Up On The Classics

The Admiralty Gallery on Ocean Drive has a new exhibition on display: It pairs music with visual art, and benefits the Atlantic Classical Orchestra, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary. On view from November 6-30, “Musical Impressions” features 25 paintings in oil by James Harrington, a Nantucket-based artist who winters in Sebastian.

An alternative title for his show might be “Musicians at Play,” for one of Harrington’s specialties is showing artists at their craft. In the current show, violins and cummerbunds in many of the paintings indicate the presence of classical musicians, but there are a couple of works featuring jazz saxophonists (one hot, one cool) and one of a supper-club piano and bass duo thrown in for good measure. Because the Admiralty Gallery has pledged to donate 10 percent of proceeds from the exhibition’s sales to the Atlantic Classical Orchestra, collectors with an eye for good music will take extra pleasure in purchasing these paintings. 

Harrington is known for his pictures of people at work, notably toilers of the sea and the art world. It matters little whether he is showing a wrack (seaweed) gatherer of yore, or a painter laboring at the easel; both of these subjects are, he writes, about “the dignity of work and the ethic of labor that draw people to their occupations.” As Harrington presents them, the lives of those who work with their hands are not only virtuous, but also colorful and romantic.

He knows whereof he paints. Starting in 1948, the artist worked with his hands as a bricklayer, a trade that allowed him the leisure to paint for four to six months of the year. And because his trade was a mobile one, Harrington never ran out of new locales in which to set up his easel.
Now 80, the artist paints the passing scene from his Nantucket studio. His works feature coastal, rural and urban settings from the mid-Atlantic states up to Canada’s Maritime Provinces. While most of his pictures are set in modern times, they have the look and feel of an era when the gasoline engine was a novelty and entertainment was taken en masse with one’s peers at the theater or circus.

Read the entire article in the November 2009 issue