Erma Allen Wheeler, Artist Who Depicted Cape Ann, 89
DGH
Emma Allen Wheeler died recently at the age of 89.
When painter Erma Allen Wheeler had a one-woman show at the Cape Ann
[Massachusetts] Historical Museum two years ago, she was 87 years old
and 30 years of her work was on display. But she refused to call it a
retrospective.
"She was always looking ahead," Michael Wheeler of Gloucester said of
his mother, who died Friday at Seacoast Nursing and Rehabilitation
Center in Gloucester at age 89.
"Are you still painting?" was a question Mrs. Wheeler was always
fielding. The answer was always a resounding "yes." Until a few weeks
ago, she still drove from her home to her studio, both in Gloucester.
"She was formidable," her son said.
"The art people tend to buy in Gloucester, Massachusetts, is
tourist-driven; hers isn't," Globe art critic Christine Temin wrote in
her review of Mrs. Wheeler's one-woman show in 2003.
She painted quarries, rocks, and seascapes with "great surges of colors
that meet, mingle, and occasionally explode," Temin said.
Mrs. Wheeler's son said that when she was asked why her colors were so
bold, she replied, "At my age, nuance goes out the window."
She particularly enjoyed studying the play of light on water. "What
fascinates me most is how all waters -- whether it's an ocean, bay,
pond, or quarry -- are distinct from each other," she said in 2003.
The paintings in her one-woman show were all watercolors, but
"watercolorist" was another label Mrs. Wheeler disdained. "I'm not a
watercolorist, I'm a painter," she said, apparently feeling that the
term ''watercolorist" has a genteel air that the label "painter"
doesn't carry.
Mrs. Wheeler gleefully traced her roots back to Christopher Avery, who
was exiled from Gloucester in 1658 after he was accused of having
spoken "scoffingly of the minister." She was born in Cleveland, Ohio,
and moved with her family to New York when she was about 10. She
attended the Art Students League, where she was a student of John
Sloan, a well-known painter of the Ashcan School who created gritty
portraits of city life.
"Everybody gravitates toward that name," Mrs. Wheeler said in 2003. "I
took his class because it was the only one that was open. He was
considered old-fashioned by then."
Mrs. Wheeler traveled in a wide circle of artists back then that
included Anais Nin and James Jones.
She designed costumes for the dances of North Shore choreographer Ina
Hahn. Along with Norma Cuneo and Ellen Ferrin, Mrs. Wheeler created the
Fisherman's Memorial Mural at Gloucester City Hall, which memorializes
the names of 5,500 men who set out from Gloucester Harbor and never
came back.
Mrs. Wheeler was an opponent of what she called "dinky art."
"She wanted everything bigger, bigger, bigger," said one of her art
students, Peter Herbert of Brooklyn, New York.
By bigger, she meant not necessarily the size of the frame, but the
thought that went into the composition.
Herbert often accompanied her to local quarries, one of her favorite
subjects. "She was wedded to the granite of Cape Ann and much of her
work showed that," he said.
Mrs. Wheeler always encouraged him to know a landscape before he
painted it. "She always said, 'You can't paint a landscape until you
walk it,"' said Herbert. "Sometimes I was exhausted before I began
painting. She was a taskmaster, but a wonderful teacher."
Herbert said Mrs. Wheeler had a very precise way of doing things.
"That included everything from making her art to preparing a cup of
coffee," he said. "For her it wasn't a simple process. It involved
several precise steps, including warming the coffee cup before you
poured the coffee in."
Unlike most artists, none of Mrs. Wheeler's eccentricities were
obvious. "You wouldn't know she was a painter until you saw her work,"
Herbert said.In addition to her son, she leaves a brother, Albert Allen
of Warren, Rhode Island [and Providence Plantations]; and two
granddaughters.
Boston Globe