Solo Sail at Wistariahurst Museum

There's no harbor called up in a photograph behind Solo Sail, no dock George Mattingly stood on with a sketchbook, no real evening he was actually there. The painting came entirely from his imagination — a hushed stretch of shoreline at dusk, the sky fading from deep blue into soft pink over still water, a single sail far off and alone on the horizon — and last June it took second place at the Holyoke Arts League's annual juried exhibition at Wistariahurst Museum.

"Most of what I paint starts with something I've actually stood in front of," George says. "This one didn't. I just kept feeling this quiet — the light going down, one small sail out there by itself — and I had to get it down before it left me."

Solo Sail leans expresses that solitude, to me. The boat is barely more than a mark on the water, small against the sky, and George let the quiet of the scene do the work — soft transitions from blue to rose, a still bay holding the last of the light, a shoreline that asks you to stop talking. It's the kind of painting that depends on knowing when to stop adding.

Wistariahurst made a fitting home for it. The museum occupies the former Skinner family estate on Cabot Street in Holyoke — the same family that ran the Skinner Silk Mill, once the largest producer of silk fabric in the world, a few blocks away in the city's Canal District. The Holyoke Arts League, now in its 102nd year, has been holding artist demonstrations and weekly figure drawing sessions in and around Holyoke for longer than almost anyone alive can remember, and its annual show at Wistariahurst has become one of the region's steadier gathering points for painters working in oil, pastel, watercolor, acrylic, and half a dozen other media. This year's exhibition opened with a reception on June 2nd, pulling in artists from across Western Massachusetts and Northern Connecticut to stand around the same rooms and look at what everyone had been doing all year.

For George, showing there wasn't really about competing with the room. "You paint by yourself for so long that you forget anyone else is going to look at it," he says. "Then you put it in a show with sixty other artists and you get to see where you actually stand. Second place was quite an unexpected honor."