At the Cape arrives at place through material rather than depiction: muted blues, warm ochres, and earthy browns build a surface whose layered marks suggest coastal elements, wind, water, rock, without resolving into any image that could be called a view. A vivid blue arc interrupts the upper field; below it, pale etched patterns and warm washes accumulate without settling. The mixed media on archival paper has a different register from Kitterle’s fresco panels: lighter, more immediately gestural, moving faster than lime allows.
At the Cape arrives at place through material rather than depiction: muted blues, warm ochres, and earthy browns build a surface whose layered marks suggest coastal elements, wind, water, rock, without resolving into any image that could be called a view. A vivid blue arc interrupts the upper field; below it, pale etched patterns and warm washes accumulate without settling. The mixed media on archival paper has a different register from Kitterle’s fresco panels: lighter, more immediately gestural, moving faster than lime allows.
Paper amplifies what fresco contains. Where the fresco surface holds its marks as permanent deposits in lime and mineral, the archival paper absorbs and bleeds, allowing color to spread beyond its intention and marks to register the speed of their making. At the Cape is the most optically transparent of Kitterle’s works on paper: layers are visible beneath one another, and the eye moves through depth rather than across surface. The quality is geological and atmospheric simultaneously, as though looking at a cliff face and at weather in the same act.
Cy Twombly’s later works on paper, which move between gestural mark-making and inscribed or smeared passages of color, occupy a comparable territory: the line between diagram, mark, and image is perpetually negotiated rather than resolved. Kitterle’s coastal reference gives At the Cape a specific orientation Twombly’s works frequently refused; the palette anchors the piece to a New England sensibility that connects back to the Luminist painters Kitterle names among his early influences: Fitz Henry Lane’s treatment of the Cape Ann coast, where the specific quality of coastal light is rendered with such precision that atmosphere and geography become the same thing.
