_{Thanks MiYoung for the photo!}

We’re more than half-way through the summer of fieldwork sessions and I’m starting to ask myself what will come from these Saturday inquiries. Honestly, I don’t have a solid answer. Sometimes fieldwork has quick results: I encounter a place and I immediately take my experience back to the studio. These walks are more of a slow burn for me. I’m finding things — spaces and architecture, mostly — that intrigue me, but when I get back to my studio I take up other projects. The trajectory of my Labor Day weekend show, for example, is quite different from the photographs and drawings I’m making on these Saturday explorations.

Should I force something? I can already read the comments: never force your creativity! But I don’t believe that’s true. There are times that stepping into terrain that does’t come naturally to me is absolutely transformative. And I find myself wondering whether this is one of those instances.

It’s not like I haven’t been thinking about these places for a long time. As a teenager riding my bike around Wellfleet Center, I thought a lot about the pictorial possibility of the town — although definitely not in those terms! But I did want to draw and paint it. I am aware that I need to feel immersed before I have the confidence to make art in a place. And maybe I just need a little more time before these spaces and places are in my blood.

This week I took photographs — mainly looking at spaces. Here are a few:

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Fieldwork Saturdays in Wellfleet: Organized by Pete Hocking & AMZehnder Gallery

This summer, we’re inviting creative people — including visual artists, photographers, writers, and others — to join us for community fieldwork sessions in Wellfleet on Saturday afternoons from 2:30 – 5 PM. This is not a workshop and there will be no instructor. Spending time in a place, looking deeply, taking notes, and allowing the place to soak into memory allows one to bring meaningful experience into the studio — and to ultimately work more intuitively.  The sessions are also designed to strike up conversation and relationships among Outer Cape artists. You’re invited to look, to draw, to paint, to photograph, to take notes, to write — and especially to connect with other creative people in our incredible community. These sessions are free and you’re welcome to join us as your schedule permits. Come for one session or all sessions! 

We’ll meet at AMZehnder Gallery at 25 Bank Street at 2:30 PM on Saturday and we’ll conclude the start of Gallery Night at 5 PM. 

Questions? Contact phocking@gmail.com