LOYAL is proud to present Paint Factory, a new suite of seven paintings which comprise Daniel Heidkamp’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery in Loyal’s new Balcony Room 2 on the second floor.

Paint Factory is a turn towards the personal. After focusing on travels and art historical research in Europe for the past several exhibitions, in this new suite of paintings, Heidkamp returns once again to his home turf, specifically the Cape Ann region, a place where he grew up going to the beaches, eating at the local clam shacks, and embarking on whale watches. The rugged eastern coastline, with its maritime scenes and tales of sailors at their trade, has long been a magnet for painters and writers alike. Notable figures from the 19th century include artists Fitz Henry Lane and Winslow Homer, as well as Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick. Gloucester specifically played a unique role in inspiring contemporary artists from the 20th century such as Edward Hopper, Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis and even Mark Rothko. While the Gloucester connection to many of these artists is quite literal, the role the region had on Rothko is more elusive.

Rothko spent many summers at the Rocky Neck Art Colony in Gloucester but there is little trace of the region’s sights in his paintings. Paint Factory takes its name from one of the paintings in the exhibition, which captures the decaying reddish structure that was once home to a company that made specialized copper paint for the underside of boats and ships to keep barnacles from attaching to the hull. The Paint Factory is a famous motif in Gloucester Harbor, and the red barn-like structure, bathed in morning rays of the Cape Ann sun, echoes the reds, ochres, and pinks found in Rothko’s most famous works. Heidkamp’s painting highlights this gradient and suggests that Rothko’s radical abstractions, in some ways, emerge from the traditions of East Coast landscape painting.

Heidkamp’s Squam Light shares its name with a painting of Annisquam Harbor Light Station by Edward Hopper, one of Hopper’s earliest works from the region. Heidkamp paints the lighthouse at dusk, with wooden dories pulled onto shore and a rocky beach scattered with buoys, nets, and lobster traps as bands of tangerine and pale pink stripe the horizon.

An earlier artist colony emerged in Annisquam Village before Rocky Neck was established. In Heidkamp’s painting of the subject Annisquam, he captures dappled summer shadows and pointillist reflections, alluding to a type of Impressionism related to Childe Hassam who painted widely throughout Gloucester. Simultaneously, the geometrical shapes of Saltbox houses, lobster traps, and angular sails suggest the influence of Stuart Davis, who used Cape Ann scenery to develop his ‘American Cubism’.

Essex Bay depicts a scene from Choate Island, an uninhabited island that is only accessible by boat. The artist and his son Hugo paddled a kayak across the shallow salt marshes of Essex Bay to spend an afternoon exploring the island and a lone house built back in 1730. This Isle is part of New England colonial history and was also used as a filming location for the 1996 movie The Crucible starring Daniel Day Lewis. In this painting, a golden path leads directly to the abandoned house, as a mosaic of blue tones depict tidal currents weaving in and out of thin stripes of bright green.

Heidkamp’s Fishermen’s Memorial is a painting of a sculpture designed by Leonard Craske for Gloucester’s Fisherman’s Memorial. In 1925 Craske had a studio alongside Milton Avery in Rocky Neck—while Avery went on to become a famous American painter, Craske is best known for this statue. With the ode to “They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships” this memorial has become the central symbol of Gloucester, depicted numerous times in cinema, especially prevalent in the film The Perfect Storm. In Heidkamp’s rendition, the statue is depicted facing a sky of pinks and reds, a dramatic sunset that veers towards abstraction, and a nod to Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman who both spent many formative months in Gloucester.

Anchored in observation, Heidkamp visits art historically relevant sites—places he refers to as having “art energy”—mining them for his own interpretation of the setting. His paintings evoke the feeling of ‘en plein air’ as he merges the enchantment he finds in these places along with the artists and movements they helped shape. He allows what he sees before him to bloom into paintings that lie in the realm between realism and abstraction.

Paint Factory is a return to the familiar, bringing it back home, and weaving artists past and present into the seaside region’s now. Paint Factory evokes a passage from T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding, yet another artist who spent cherished time in Gloucester: “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

DANIEL HEIDKAMP (b. 1980, Wakefield, Massachusetts) lives and works in New York. Heidkamp received his BFA from School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA in 2003. Solo exhibitions include Acquavella Galleries (Palm Beach), Half Gallery (Los Angeles and New York), Loyal (Stockholm), Pace Prints (New York), The Journal (New York), White Columns (New York). His work has been presented in many group exhibitions including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), The Ranch (Montauk), Almine Rech (New York), SPURS Gallery (Beijing), among others. His work is included in The Met’s permanent collection.