The Artist on the Beach at Provincetown - Charles Demuth Art Print

Charles Demuth turns suntan into a confession. In The Artist on the Beach at Provincetown, the young painter sits shirtless on the sand with his back to us, a coral red expanse of skin laced with pencil lines along the spine. He lifts a cigarette in one hand, his other grips a loose fistful of brushes.

Weathered wharf pilings crowd around him in charcoal gray, their pigment granulated into grainy soot. Beyond them the harbor goes lavender slate. Sailboats tilt. The small town floats on the horizon in graphite, a promise still in draft.

This 1934 watercolor belongs to Demuth's return to the Provincetown art colony, two decades after his summers among the Provincetown Players. The crisp edges of Precisionism loosen here into wet blooms. Indigo trunks puddle into bruised navy above a white belt. A brown palette rests by his bare heel, speckled with cobalt and vermilion.

This self portrait as male figure study joins Demuth's historical Provincetown beach scenes, a series frank about the pleasure of looking at men. An empty canvas waits before him, outlined in pencil. A blank day propped at his knee. American modernism resting in the sand with lowered brushes contemplating the sea.