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Review: The eye-popping vitality of 'Printed in Providence'

Museum And Gallery

Gang of six

Around town lately, you may have noted the screenprint that Andrew Moon Bain designed for the four-person exhibit “4 Thieves” at Firehouse 13 (41 Central Street, Providence, through September 29). It shows the heads of the artists growing out of a tree amidst a dazzling storm of swirling lines. It looks like the poster for an amazing rock show. And it lured me back to the Firehouse, which has a track record of awesome musical events but disappointing art.

Bain, who splits his time between Providence and Brooklyn, doesn’t disappoint with his collaged paintings. In one picture, a soldier sleeps on hills, made from a pink fish scale pattern, under diamond-leaved trees next to a green lake filled with pink fish. Roses, blue clouds, and winged heads float in the yellow sky above. Another painting shows a cut-out brown bird pasted onto a green sky over a pattern of flat green mountains scarved with mist. They are cute, bright, graphic, patchwork dreamscapes.

The Providence Art Club (11 Thomas Street, Providence), which just celebrated the completion of its $3.5 million renovation and expansion, is presenting a retrospective pairing of two venerable local artists: Thomas Sgouros of Providence and Maxwell Mays of Coventry (through October 2).

Mays’s paintings of quaint olden days in Rhode Island mix the folksiness of J.O.J. Frost of Marblehead, Massachusetts, or Grandma Moses with the easygoing appeal of New Yorker covers. (Mays’s paintings have graced the cover of Yankee magazine two dozen times.) In 44 works from the 1950s to this decade, his main subjects are bustling Main Street USA intersections and bird’s-eye historical panoramas of Ocean State towns in which he seems to have carefully noted every leaf, every brick.

My favorite is Pawtuxet Village (1989), which depicts rows of matching black and white houses near a water-powered mill. Cows, barns, and striped farm fields spread across the surrounding, rolling green hills. Horse-drawn carriages and a stream train go through the town. It’s as charming as a toy train set.

Sgouros is represented by 30 paintings — uptight still-lifes from the mid-1980s to mid-’90s, and brand new soft-focus, impressionistic Remembered Landscapes. The simplified landscapes, which he continues to paint despite losing more and more of his sight to macular degeneration, sometimes turn generic. But the rusty hues and great clouds billowing over marshes and slivers of shiny water can still evoke a strong autumn mood.