MADELYN CARNEY

There is a steady rhythm to Provincetown Harbor and the way light settles across the sky and MacMillan Pier. For nearly fifty years, this rhythm and light shaped the work of Madelyn Carney, who painted again and again the view from her picture window at 411 Commercial Street. Watercolor was her chosen medium, and, like her subjects of sky and water, it resists control and rewards patience.

Much of Madelyn Carney’s work is rooted in attentive observation of clouds gathering above the horizon, just beyond the pier. Whether painting portraits, harbor scenes, or the curve of a flower’s petal, Madelyn was drawn to representation and exacting detail. But it was Provincetown’s skies, harbor, and pier that were a constant subject for her.

Madelyn received her degree in art education from Massachusetts College of Art in 1952. In the 1970s and ’80s, she studied with artists who shaped her painting sensibilities. With Provincetown artist Henry Hensche, she studied color in the Cape School tradition. Later studies with Provincetown painter Jim Forsberg introduced her to concepts of abstraction passed down from the teaching of the modernist painter Hans Hofmann. From Boston School artist Robert Cormier of Fenway Studios, Madelyn received nearly a decade of classical training in portraiture.

Later in life, while attending a weekly writing group through Boston College’s Institute for Learning in Retirement, Madelyn wrote more than thirty short stories. In 2010, her children collected these stories into a memoir titled Hills and Harbors. Writing, like painting, was for her a form of close attention—an effort to turn the ordinary into something luminous. Madelyn’s life, divided between Boston and Provincetown and enriched by nine children and thirteen grandchildren, offered landscapes both personal and profound. These lives and places were not separate from her art but deeply woven into it.

MacMillan Wharf, Calm Harbor

$525.00

MacMillan Wharf, Morning Light

$525.00

Macmillan Wharf, Warm Tones

$525.00

MADELYN CARNEY

MacMillan Wharf, Calm Harbor

MacMillan Wharf, Morning Light

Macmillan Wharf, Warm Tones

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