Artist Statement About the Exhibition

This exhibit is a collection of paintings reflecting my transition to living full time as an artist on Cape Cod. I first came to Cape Cod as a teenager in the early 1970’s and spent my summers in Provincetown and Hyannis. Enamored and attracted to the Cape’s beauty, light and water, the vibrant Provincetown arts colony, I knew one day I would return to the Cape to live and paint full time as an artist, uninterrupted. In 2019, my journey was revisited, and I had returned. I moved from Connecticut to the Cape, dedicating and immersing myself into painting and metamorphosis, “I need to paint because I must”. The brilliance and unique light of the Cape is what attracts me, it is ever changing, and capturing it is everything to an artist. I love to blend colors, push close values, layering to create soft atmospheric, and ethereal effects. I mostly paint landscapes and often will incorporate cold wax medium with oil paint to create expressionistic, textured, abstract work.

About the Artist

Elaine Tata is a Yarmouth artist specializing in landscape oil painting and cold wax. Her interest in painting seriously began when she was 16 while spending her summers on Cape Cod in Hyannis, and in Provincetown while experiencing and becoming enmeshed in its vibrant art scene. After receiving her degree in Art Education, Elaine taught in the Windsor Connecticut public schools for ten years. In the summer of 1981, she took up residency to paint at the Fine Art Works Center studio barn in Provincetown. At a crossroad of intellectual curiosity and restlessness, she took a year off from teaching and studied architecture at the Boston Architectural Center. Still restless, she went on to pursue a law degree and worked as an Attorney for the State of Connecticut, specializing in child protection. She now paints full time and conducts workshops encouraging others to pursue their artistic development. She primarily paints in oils and will often use cold wax medium to create expressionistic and abstract landscapes, seascapes, still life and figurative forms, blending colors, creating layers, and capturing the subtilties of light and atmosphere.

She is represented by the Blue Heron Gallery, Wellfleet and is a member of the Provincetown Art Association Museum, the Cultural Center of Cape Cod, the Falmouth Arts Center, the Creative Arts Center in Chatham, and is a Juried Artist Member at the Cape Cod Art Center.