James Wolcott was your friendly neighborhood radiologist, working those gamma rays and CT scans at Concord Hospital for years. Since his recent retirement, he's traded in the X-rays for a new kind of visual art. He creates abstract paintings on unique media.
“I really just like the process of finding materials to use,” Wolcott said, “and using them in a way, with color, that creates something of beauty.”
While he was still working as a radiologist, Wolcott started painting on, what else, surgical gauze. Even when stretched out into the traditional rectangular canvas shape, the porous cloth material created a three-dimensional medium for him to paint on.
For his latest offering, Wolcott has graduated from gauze to burlap. He wove strips of the stuff into a layered 46 by 32 inch canvas. Using unorthodox tools (like a pizza cutter!) as well as traditional brushwork, he painted each layer as he went. The result is “Untitled-Weaves Blue,” which will be available at the Friends Program auction.
“I hope that someone will bid on it and the Friends Program will profit from it,” Wolcott said. This is his first artwork donation to the Friends Auction, although he has taken part in the auction before. Wolcott thoroughly endorse the program.
“It epitomizes a community-based charitable organization in that everything they acquire financially is redirected into the local community,” Wolcott said. “I like that local people have a chance to support local organizations, it just seems, to me, more intimate.”
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