Art show revels in Narragansett Bay's revival

A soggy, gray December day turned for the better inside the Save The Bay Center at Fields Point, where hundreds of images in a range of media showcased the drama and personality of Rhode Island's signature landscape.

Visible just a few feet away, the water of Narragansett Bay rippled in the wind, pockmarked by rain, while on the walls and shelves of the Save The Bay Center it presented all of its moods and colors in photographs, paintings, sculptures, even jewelry, showcasing the beauty and diversity of the state's most precious resource. The show is haphazardly presented, but there is a sense of meandering joy in finding surprises amid seascape clichés. The bay is depicted in all seasons and times of day and night. Familiar landmarks, including many of the state's lighthouses and points, are commonly represented. (The Newport Bridge, in particular, seems to have emerged as Rhode Island's Motif No. 1, our artistic answer to Rockport's red fishing shack and San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.)

The show spotlights the usual suspects - osprey and geese, herons and stripers, the odd gull, the odd quahog. The horseshoe crab, one of the world's oldest creatures, possessed with a graphically distinctive armored shape, and observed more frequently in recent years as a sign of the bay's revitalized health, appears as one of the more popular characters in this year's show. There are waves rendered in all of their variety, boats of all kinds, surfers and solitary fishermen, sails and saltboxes, and images both familiar and enticing to the everyday Rhode Island beachcomber.

Mary Chatowsky Jameson, a native Rhode Islander who splits her time between Middletown and Jamaica Plain, Mass., contributes exquisite images of sea flora, the seaweeds and other plants strewn across Rhode Island shores, pressed and dried into pleasing designs of delicate shapes with subtle colors. Her Porphyra and Chordaria flagelliformis (back whip weed) are particularly striking. A hand-printed serigraph, titled "Seaweed," by Ashley Van Etten, offers a similarly engaging variant.

North Kingstown free diver and photographer Mike Laptew includes a stunning photograph of an osprey in flight, yellow-eyed, clutching a herring in its talons, depicting one of the daily dramas of the Rhode Island coast at the time of the osprey's return - and the herring's - each spring.

Evocative coastal scenes include "Winter Harbor," an oil by Saunderstown painter Jonathan McPhillips, reminding us how every New England season offers its own visual charm, and two appealing photographs by Wickford's Cindy Horovitz Wilson. One, "Red Pelican Reflections," is an abstract of rippling red streaking across the water, while the other, "Clear Reflections," is a tranquil harbor scene of early morning mist and mast.

Carl Peter Mayer's seemingly impossible balanced rock sculptures, made up of columns of large beach stones topped by heart-shaped rocks, which graced the sea wall near Narragansett Town Beach a couple of years ago until weather and physics took over, make a welcome return to the Save The Bay show.

While the exhibition overall captures the exuberance of the bay, and all who enjoy its company, one wishes for a bit more daring, a grittier edge. Most works take aim at scenery, or natural diversity, but few tackle the issue of bay preservation - the underlying theme of the show - in ways that are cognitively challenging or emotionally wrenching.

But, of course, the purpose of the annual Save The Bay art show is to sell images, to support the artists and the organization's marine science education program. So we are given more pretty scenes than provocative ones. Which is fine, especially on a day when parking lots turn to puddles, all of the color has been washed out of sea and sky, and the prevailing atmosphere is so raw, damp and cold that a squid might be tempted to volunteer for the calamari skillet. On days like these, there are advantages to enjoying the bay indoors.