Kenneth Stubbs
(American artist, 1907-1967)

photograph of the artist
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The whole is as lovely as the sum of its parts.

Artist Kenneth Stubbs, who was born in Ochlocknee, Georgia, but spent half of each year in Provincetown for the last decade of his life, was a quiet force in the town's artistic circles.

His nearly poetic comprehension of the mathematics that underlie reality, blended with a clear grip on classical drawing, led to a body of work that feels both lyrical and intuitively complete.

Although Stubbs has produced fine watercolors and drawings that reveal his love of structure, his geometric abstractions based on the rhythms of people and things — the invisible movements faceted into forms themselves, are his real power.

Frank Getlein writes in a PAAM 1991 catalog about Stubbs' work, "The operating principle ... is that everything relates to everything else, not only in linear strength, but in shape and in color ... it is possible to start anywhere, really, and move to an adjoining area across, up, down, and diagonally away, all around the painting as if you were flipping cutout shapes, lines or their equivalents in color. Everything relates to everything."

Stubbs' more flamboyant counterparts may have taken center stage in Provincetown art history, but his is true to the quieter, grounding principles that make art dance.

Although the show opened at the Cape Museum of Fine Arts this summer, there are only a few days left to appreciate this man's take on form. Don't miss it.

Kenneth Stubbs: "Gems of Form" through Sept. 22 at the Cape Museum of Fine Arts, Rt. 6A, Dennis. 385-4477.

Cape Cod Voice, September 12, 2002, p. 46