By Dan Mac Alpine / MELROSE@CNC.COM
Wednesday, April 23, 2003

Tom Sutherland displays one of his early watercolors on his dining-room wall. It's large, perhaps 3' wide x 2' tall. It depicts The U.S.S. Constitution and another ship, docked. The painting displays precision and almost painful attention to detail. Each line in the rigging shows. Each brick in the background buildings has its own identity. Each figure delineated.

All is stiff, rigid and sterile - were a wave to actually break on Sutherland's Old Ironsides the ship appears as if it would shatter as a glass pane struck with a rock.

Fast forward four years.

Sutherland is preparing for his one-man show at the Beebe Estate this May, sifting through snap shots of paintings scattered over a coffee table, next to a make-shift studio off the living room.

The watercolors capture multiple moods and images - some soft, the colors transparent, melting into one anther in a near dreamscape, others relying on sharply cut, almost sculptural buildings, with streets full of faceless figures all merging into a buzzing throng before, say, the Coliseum, or shoving onto a crowded tram in Milan.

One painting jumps out from the rest. It's style more insistent. More emotionally flagrant. It's the "Greenhouse" from Rockland, Maine.

Sutherland, who routinely spends $100 to $150 on French brushes made from sable fur or squirrel hairs, painted this best-in-show water color with a paint stick.

"It was an experiment," said Sutherland.

Or, maybe, an act of desperation.

Sutherland had been painting all morning and wasn't satisfied with the results. This, from an artist who often finishes a painting in an hour or less - Sutherland stresses the moment's immediacy in his work. "I was very frustrated," remembered Sutherland. "Nothing was working. I came back in the afternoon and just saw my paint stick and decided to use that instead of a brush."

The result was a painting with more depth and substance than most watercolors, yet still maintaining the ethereal quality water-color fans seek in its background and a patch of blue sky in the upper left corner.

Sutherland used a mix of techniques to create a painting of a simple New England stick, two-story home - with a front porch and American flag and a side flower garden.

So quaint. So simple. Yet, the painting careens on the edge of control.

The home's thin yellow siding glows as smeared splotches of watercolor, green and brown, hang over the home and block out much of the house - as tree branches often do.

The windows, outlined in white, with the hint of mullions, square, black holes break open the home's side, while down the home's length splashes, splotches and lines of red, yellow and green suggest a flower garden.

The combinations of using the stick's flat side, its point, splattering paint off it on to the paper, and using color almost straight out of the tube, so thick it invokes the depth and dimension of oil or acrylic paints - over the more typical wash of water color, creates a painting of unusual visual contrast and tension and internal excitement - almost capturing the feel of boyhood summer - the anticipation of the Fourth of July parade and fireworks, the thrill of the ice cream bell and the hope mom might spring for a Creamsicle.

The techniques, the images and the emotions they invoke couldn't be further away from the Constitution painting.

For Sutherland, that's the point.

"I keep the painting not because I think it's good, but because it reminds me of how far I've come and where I want to go," said Sutherland.

"There is a term I've learned working with artists," he said. "It's looseness. Artists are always striving for looseness in their work."

The quest seems particularly important to Sutherland who began his professional life as an engineer -- where straight lines, precision and absolute detail rule.

Sutherland, it seems, has been fleeing from that fate for much of his adult life. He quickly moved from engineering to sign carving and painting. "I wanted to do wood carving, but the financial constraints made that unrealistic," he said. "I was at Cape Cod and I saw these hand-carved signs in the early '70s." So the hobby of woodcarving turned to a profession as a sign maker. Today, anyone who has eaten baby-back ribs at a national chain, pizza at a national chain or any number of other nationally marketed cuisines has probably seen Sutherland's work.

For now, the sign work still pays the bills. "As I get older, I'd like to turn more and more of my work over to painting," Sutherland said.

In his upcoming show, the watercolorist demonstrates a variety of moods and styles, not because he's experimenting, but because of changes in venue.

A pastoral, farmhouse scene in Dingle, Ireland, reflects the more traditional role of water color as a medium. Washes of green and blue color layered over one another, a dreamlike thinness and transparency create a tranquil, placid moment.

On the other hand, "Quarter to Four," depicting rush hour in Rome runs the opposite direction. Golden tones, yellows, a couple splashes of red, loosely imaged cars and sidewalks crowded with barely outlined people, done in black with a bright, white-blue sky overhead, a clock, signs and buildings almost pressing out the light, create a sense of pressure, movement and excitement.

"I did the painting in Ireland that way, because that is the way Ireland is," said Sutherland. "Italy is very different. The paintings reflect their settings."

Despite the changes in venue and Sutherland's globe-trotting influences, he hopes to be evolving a style all his own. Currently, he considers himself squarely in the impressionistic school - that thread of loosely interpreting details, suggesting a building, a shadow, a tree, a face in a pressing city crowd - runs through his work. Sutherland is more interested in capturing the sum of the parts instead of the parts alone. The sum impresses unseen emotion and visual vitality on the viewer.

"I'd like to think I'm evolving my own style," said Sutherland. "I want my work to be my own. The key is never being satisfied with what you're doing, to keep searching."