John Dowd frequently paints scenes of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he lives, such as Last Light (2020).
All images courtesy of John Dowd
Should you be walking the streets of Provincetown late at night, no matter what time of year, you might pass an old white clapboard house with a light on at the top floor. That could be the home of John Dowd, indicating that he is awake, and applying brushstrokes to a new canvas, likely depicting something right in town that he had seen by day or in the darkness. When the artist admits to being “a nocturnal person,” he is not being facetious, for, as he says, he “paints from after dinner till dawn. It affords me the opportunity to paint without any distractions.”
In working on his canvases, while the rest of the beach town at the coiled end of Cape Cod is asleep, Dowd is able to best harness, capture, and articulate on canvas what he calls “a portrait of a mood.” Even for those not familiar with the topography of Provincetown or the Colonial-era and Greek Revival architecture of much of the town, its commercial streets dense with quaint wooden structures, what Dowd features on his canvases can be as much a scene of something real as it is an emotion. “I know that a painting is most successful when someone feels something about it, rather than just being able to say, ‘Oh, I know where that house is in town.’”
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Portraitist of Moods
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