A Painter’s Search for What Endures

Abigail Dudley in her studio at the Fine Arts Work Center.
Photo: Agata Storer

When Abigail Dudley, a visual arts fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, was in graduate school at the University of Delaware, she went to Italy to study Giotto’s frescoes. She observed the effects of time — what remained of the image, and what had deteriorated — and found herself moved by the durability of details painted hundreds of years ago.

“The way Giotto would render a cloth with a shift from light to dark is amazing,” says Dudley. “Even within such a simple element in the painting, there’s so much care and attention.”

In Provincetown, Dudley has been working on a series of figurative paintings, often featuring herself painted in warm earthtones. It has been a productive season for her, and the paintings line the walls of her studio. Like Italian frescoes, which had to be painted with a certain degree of speed before the lime plaster hardened, Dudley’s paintings breathe with an openness that she achieves by letting areas of the painting remain seemingly unfinished.

In one oil painting of a woman sitting curled up in the center of the composition, her body, painted with the delicacy of a watercolor, seems to evaporate into the milky atmosphere surrounding her. In another painting, Dudley renders houseplants in the foreground of the composition with quick, provisional marks like a sketch. But there are also spaces in her paintings that are rich in detail, like a meticulously painted spindly plant with yellow flowers, and many of her figures are built up as dense masses, like the couple sitting back to back in Harvest Moon that seem as solid as rocks.