On Thursday evening in Newport, a small, well-heeled crowd—including Carolyn Rafaelian, Jamie and Monique Coleman, Calvin Tomkins, Alex Da Corte, The Paris Review’s Emily Stokes, Karina Sokolovsky of Sotheby’s, and Kern Maass, president of IYRS School of Technology Trades—assembled in Restoration Hall, the 18,000-square-foot home to the Boatbuilding Restoration program at IYRS, for a dinner in honor of artist Cy Gavin. The following day, “Cy Gavin: Seven Paintings,” an exhibition of new, site-responsive works organized by Art&Newport (the brainchild of longtime Vogue contributor Dodie Kazanjian), would open there, remaining on view—at no charge to the public—for five weeks.
Born in Pittsburgh but based in the Hudson Valley, Gavin has long vested his work with an attention to the natural world, riffing on landscape and cosmology in his powerfully gestural paintings. The ones up in Newport are no different, at once inspired by IYRS’s immediate surroundings (Restoration Hall sits right on Newport Harbor), by the ancient practice of celestial navigation, and by what happens at the school on a daily basis.
On his first visit to the campus, some six months ago, Gavin peered down from the catwalk in Restoration Hall, watching IYRS’s students learn to build boats by restoring old wooden ones. Invited to do with the space what he liked (other Art&Newport shows have transformed the historic Isaac Bell House a half-mile east, or the Belmont Chapel in the Island Cemetery), he knew quickly that he wanted to embrace the context: “It was really difficult to imagine anything in that space that wasn’t related to a boat,” Gavin says, speaking by phone from Newport. “I think it would be lost in the space, too. And that was the point of coming: to get a sense of the venue, the orientation of it on the water, how it related to the town, how it related to where the sun sets.” In the end, his project became about “using the space to activate the paintings.”
He would go about this in a few different ways. For one thing, Gavin used real yacht sails—two mainsails, one jib—as his canvases, exploiting their translucency to depict teeming night skies with dazzling effect. The material “had a lot of interesting, exciting properties that lend themselves to [depicting] stars,” he says. “From afar, it looks like the stars are painted, but actually, everything is painted but the stars.” It also placed the new paintings within a rich—and ancient—artistic tradition: Before canvas was produced explicitly for painters’ use, artists in Renaissance-era Venice would repurpose excess sailcloth, then made from linen or cotton fibers.
Additionally, scrapping a nascent idea to erect a wall that would “sort of offset the work from the space,” Gavin decided to suspend the three biggest paintings—one of which is an astonishing 46 feet tall and 26 feet wide, the most massive he has ever made—from the Restoration Hall’s ceiling, embracing its vastness. (The other four works that round out the show are tiny, circular paintings “of individual stars,” per Gavin, which he’s hidden throughout the venue.)
Although Gavin has been in Newport for several days when we speak, he sadly hasn’t had the chance to do much seafaring himself: “I’ve just been inside all the time, ironically,” he admits with a laugh. He does, however, have a different sort of adventure on the horizon. Shortly after the opening of Seven Paintings, Gavin is off to Paris for a residency at the Palais Garnier. “You’re living at the opera house and engaging with the dancers and singers, and then something comes out of that experience,” he explains of the program, called Project 12. Needless to say, Gavin is ready to take the plunge: “I’m so excited.”
“Cy Gavin: Seven Paintings” is on view from Monday to Friday, 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., at IYRS School of Technology Trades in Newport, Rhode Island, through August 29.