The Primacy of Water: An Interview with Anne Flash

A certain surrender needs to happen, even a sense of desperation. I throw my hands up, and then I see it—a color calls for another.
 

Introduction

Anne Flash is a multimedia artist and chef whose connections to Cape Cod in Massachusetts date back to childhood. Like most artists, she expresses her artistry across divergent disciplines. She’s taught art in both college and community college settings in New England, but also worked as a sous chef, baker, and chef in New York City, in Boston, on Nantucket, and on Cape Cod.

In addition to offering diverse opportunities for artistic expression, working in restaurants gave Flash a certain amount of economic freedom to pursue her art. After starting a catering company, Flash in the Pan, on Cape Cod, she had the opportunity to cook for the departing Prime Minister of the U.K. and his entourage for a week. 

Much of Flash’s painting reflects the natural environment in which she’s lived for nearly three decades. Early on, her watercolors of the Cape portrayed peaceful and idyllic scenes of shorelines and lighthouses. Over time, her vision of the Cape morphed into a place buffeted by unpredictable natural forces. For years, the barrier beaches at Chatham Light slowly eroded. Then, in 1987, fueled by a Nor’easter, the pounding ocean and unrelenting winds tore through the barrier beaches, allowing the ocean to rush into Chatham Harbor and cause significant damage to the shoreline. The break, to Flash, reflected the Atlantic’s power “to transform what we had quaintly thought of as ‘the seaside.’” As a result, her painting has come to reflect a more precarious view of nature and the “roiling seas.” 

Flash insists she’s not a “conceptual artist,” but her work reflects a consistent awareness of the forces that the looming climate catastrophe present to our trusted environment. In Flash’s eyes, her work is “headed full tilt into the storm and imbalance.” There’s no going back to tranquil seascapes. “The earth is on fire,” she says. “Where the land meets the sea is less pastoral and more polemical.” 

Flash’s two-person show with former student John Koch opened July 5 and continues through the end of the month at Seashore Point at 100 Alden Street in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The show is called Facing Each Other.
  

  
Interview

Jim Ross: Your work focuses on the coast of Cape Cod. Do you consider the Cape home? 

Anne Flash: For now. I’ve lived in various Cape Cod towns over 27 years of being this side of the bridge. To a real Cape Codder, that makes me a serial “wash-ashore.”

I was raised in Connecticut on the campus of a prep school where my father taught. The Cape was the place we visited in summertime. Both sets of grandparents had settled here. My parents bought a house in Chatham, right on Stage Harbor, when I was seven. It had no heat, so we only stayed there in warmer months. In 1984, my father retired. My parents built an addition to the house, heated it, and moved in year-round. I joined them on the Cape 13 years later.

Jim Ross: Where had you called home until then?

Anne Flash: The idea of “home” had been elusive. I lived in Nantucket for two years as a private cook and then as a baker. I moved to Cambridge for ten years, went to art school in Boston, got married and divorced, then moved to South Boston and lived illegally (with all the other artists) in a loft building across from the Gilette Factory.

A friend in New York called and asked if I would trade my car for the use of her loft in Soho. I said yes and spent several years living in the city, going to graduate school and working in restaurants while I earned my MFA. I lived in seven places in five years: Soho, the East Village, the Garment District (Lower East Side), Greenwich Village, Long Island City, Williamsburg, even Hoboken. Then I got a job in Northern Jersey as an artist-in-residence at a girls’ boarding school. That lasted a year because I got a better job at a small private college, in landlocked Hartford. I worked there for four years before finally returning here in my early 40s.

Jim Ross: Some claim that artists bring all their life experiences to bear in the moment of creation. You’re also a cook. How have you channeled those experiences into your art?

Anne Flash: I was a child chemist. I conducted experiments with my chemistry sets. I was also a child cook and baker. I baked my own birthday cake in second grade. I grew into an adult-sized baker, a garde manger, a sauté chef, a brunch chef, a personal chef, and a short-order deli chef—on the Cape, but also at various restaurants on Nantucket, in Boston, Cambridge, and New York.

There are many parallels between cooking and artmaking. Both have this primal ability to transform. Dough needs time to rise. All food has this time-element, various times for different foods. There are many variables, just as in the making of visual art. You try this color with that color—you walk away and come back to it, you like it, you add more yellow or spice, you taste it, change the color, hang it, bake it, freeze it—lots of physics involved in both practices.

Experiments with art and food shed light on each other because of their similar substance-nature. I would suggest eating the food first, of course, and then painting the painting. One must be nourished to nourish. Both practices involve manipulation and transformation of substances, and nourishment for the soul. I think about pure research in which scientists intentionally experiment with unknowns in their laboratories to see what happens, like the processes of Madame Curie, Thomas Edison, and Albert Einstein. Artmaking is like that for me.

Jim Ross: In your younger years, what was your preferred means of representing the Cape?

Anne Flash: All my early memories of Cape Cod include the primacy of water. I often dreamed of being swallowed up by enormous waves at the edge of our yard. As a teen, I used to take our Boston Whaler out to a sandbar at low tide and paint watercolors of the lighthouse at the tip of Harding’s Beach. I was doing lots of watercolors of land- and seascapes at the time. 

Jim Ross: What are your preferred materials?

Anne Flash: I love oil pastels and oil paint on paper. Also, black ink and watercolors. When I went to a Van Gogh show in New York, I got the idea of making pens out of beach reeds after seeing a case of all Van Gogh’s home-made reed pens. There are trillions of beach reeds here on the Cape! When I teach drawing at the local community college, I have my students make these beach-reed pens for their pen-and-ink still lifes and beachscapes.

Jim Ross: There was a shift in how you portrayed the Cape, from peaceful and idyllic to a precarious place buffeted by unpredictable forces of nature. When and why did your vision change?

Anne Flash: There was an organic transition. I had become an abstract painter, after all that schooling, in New York. I was making huge oil pastel drawings on paper in my little studio behind Port Authority in Hell’s Kitchen. They reflected the experience of walking back and forth on various streets, noticing colors and rhythms, repetitions, changes.

In the area where we lived, an important local landmark was Chatham Light, overlooking Lighthouse Beach. For years, the barrier beaches had been slowly eroding. In 1987, a Nor’easter accelerated that. The pounding ocean, driven by unrelenting winds, tore through the barrier beaches at a weak point. Fishermen and carpenters had been sitting in their trucks expecting this to happen. The day it did, we drove to the same lookout to watch the water rush in. The break allowed the ocean to rush into Chatham Harbor and cause significant damage to the shoreline. It also affected the fishing industry because the opening to the big wide ocean was growing every day, and the fishermen had to relearn where the channel was.

To me, the break reflected the power of the Atlantic to transform what we quaintly thought of as “the seaside.” It felt personal, like an upheaval. Million-dollar boulder walls that people scrambled to build in front of their houses only served to kick the can down the road temporarily. We believed my parents’ house was not in danger, because it was built on a harbor and protected by a manmade dike.

In August 1991, Hurricane Bob slammed into New England—one of the most damaging storms in over 50 years. The Cape received little rain, but some of the storm’s strongest winds. The entire Cape lost power. Miraculously, our Stage Harbor house survived, even though the water covered the deck and lapped at the doors. We were saved by the tide. The water receded. Bob showed us that we were physically vulnerable.

My mother loved that house and planned to live out the rest of her days there. My father, however, was not in good health. He felt strongly that he could no longer protect our house from wind and tide. They sold it three years later and moved inland to a house that just happened to contain an empty accessory dwelling unit and a studio above the garage.

Jim Ross: You began facing the roiling oceans head-on in 1998, a year after you moved to the Cape. What can you tell us about that time period?

Anne Flash: The circumstances surrounding my final departure from Connecticut, coupled with the realization that my father’s health was precarious, pushed me toward a place that became increasingly dark. I recognized it was time to leave my landlocked life. I moved into my parents’ empty basement apartment. I set my studio up and returned to work as a short-order cook at a restaurant in Chatham where I had worked many summers previously.

Going back to the coast led to a spiritual reckoning: I needed a spiritual community. I started going to church with my father and joined the choir. It was enormously powerful to see what the church meant to him. Because I was sitting in the choir stall near the altar, I could see the beatific expression on my father’s face as he took communion.

Soon after that, he died at 73. I was grief-stricken. I had no answers. I couldn’t even formulate questions. Then I heard my father’s voice encouraging me. He said, “You have everything you need. Stop screwing around.” I dug into my art. My paintings tended to reflect my inner landscape. The almighty ocean cleansed but also took away. The fragility of the coastline that I walked on every day mirrored my sustained inner turmoil.

Seeking a way through my personal darkness and the coastline’s fragility, I began my large “Red Sea” during an artist residency at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, building on the large-format practice I developed in New York. “Red Sea” tells a creation story of sorts, about an Old Testament God who creates a dry passage through the Red Sea to save the Jews from the Egyptians. I was thinking about weather maps and barometer readings. The story went from left to right in five consecutive squares. The first square represented both the order and the chaos of a weather map—wind churning over primordial water.

The whole enormous work on paper is simultaneously about turbulence in nature, and humankind’s attempts to find order through it. The middle section shows a scaffolding, but more boldly a dark blue obelisk form, precisely in the middle of the five squares. It became a monument and a passage at the same time. Obelisks were first created by Egyptians, interestingly enough. To them, an obelisk represented the sun god Ra. The form was said to be a petrified ray of the sun. The irony embedded in that form intrigued me.

Jim Ross: Quick diversion: When you finally moved to the Cape year-round and began working again as a chef, did you find it satisfying? Did cooking end up playing a bigger role in your life?

Anne Flash: Cooking was hard, physical work, but gave me a sense of freedom. It led to my starting Flash in the Pan Home Cooking, an unofficial catering business (riffing off my last name). I soon was hired as personal chef for two women dying of cancer and a third who had crippling fibromyalgia. All three were 45 to 50 years old, but severely compromised. Bringing each of them still-warm meals so they could sit and dine with their loved ones was important means of maintaining some quality of life in the time that remained.

One week in summer 1998, I was personal chef to a recent Prime Minister of the U.K., and his entourage, including Scotland Yard. Initially, his handlers wouldn’t give me his name. All I was told was that he insisted on Thomas’s English muffins and butter rather than mayo on his sandwiches. The people who hired me first conducted a security check. Nobody was supposed to know that this recent PM was vacationing in Chatham.

Because the Scotland Yard fellows increasingly set their command post up in the rented mansion’s kitchen, I ran home and cooked everything in a tiny kitchenette in my parents’ basement. This included an American BBQ for ten people, including baronesses and other titled folk from Parliament. The PM had walked me around the yard a day earlier to discuss the menu in some detail. He told me he would very much “fancy” a blackberry pie. I made it all in my tiny kitchen and then filled my car and drove fast back to the residence on Shore Road, where the Brits were staying. It was a big hit. At the end of the week, the PM gave me a beautiful book about Chequers, the country house of the PM, written by his wife.

Jim Ross: Was there another pastoral period before you began your “Roiling Seas” paintings?

Anne Flash: Of sorts. I created a piece titled “Curly Like Me” that was obliquely self-referential. It was a lush balance of reds and saffron yellows, which I recognize now as a rediscovery of psychic wholeness. I consider it pastoral because it draws some idealized connection between the waves I regularly walk by and my curly hair.

Jim Ross: When you say “Curly Like Me” was self-referential, are you referring to your battle with cancer and how it affected your work?

Anne Flash: No, I created that long after my cancer journey. Earlier, during my chemo and radiation treatment, I did hundreds of tiny mixed-media pieces. These were constructed using more interior forms and tangled lines. I call that work collectively, “Notes from the Chemo-files.” They were often little more than three-inch Post-its, many of my cat, but also rubbings and layerings of intricate pathways and mazes, with the thought of nature, in some respects sublime, but ultimately out of whack.

There is something very much out of order in cancer. I was being treated with an aggressive form of chemo because the cancer had spread to my lymph nodes. I exhibited many of them at the Cape Cod chapter of the American Cancer Society. After that, I did a triptych titled “Radiant Being,” which was my tongue-in-cheek reference to the daily radiation treatments I received after chemo was over.

Before now, I hadn’t made the connection before between being a cancer survivor and our climate situation. Now that we’re talking about it, I see the connection. Through cancer, I was experiencing nature out of whack in my own body! Radiation and chemo were both forms of cancer warfare; fighting fire with fire, if you will.

Jim Ross: You’ve done some work, mostly watercolors, that I would call truly pastoral, such as “Salt Kettle Front Garden.” How far back am I reaching to find pastoral pieces like that?

Anne Flash: Not too long ago—maybe 2015? Even a sweet watercolor of flowers and trees is a nod to what we’re losing from our physical and psychic environments. It’s important for contrast to hold onto and continue to capture scenes like these because they exist outside of, yet in tandem with, the stirred-up waters and scorched earth of my most recent paintings.

Jim Ross: You’ve also been intrigued by sea walls. Can you say something about that?

Anne Flash: I’ve made the breaching of sea walls a secondary theme of several mixed media works on paper. I’ve also played digitally with various color combinations in these pieces, and love how my graphics program can readily alter my images in cool, hands-off ways I never would’ve come up with in studio. As an example, I can easily switch the colors in a piece to their opposites, red to green, orange to blue. Sometimes those digital works are more dynamic than the studio works.

Jim Ross: Did anything trigger your renewed emphasis on the powers of water?

Anne Flash: A few years ago, to celebrate her 90th birthday, my mother, my brother David, and I took a small plane tour to explore the topography of the Cape’s coastline. We saw the exquisite and delicate beauty of the Cape from that vantage point. I saw the sand shoals surrounding the Lower and Outer Cape—the brightness of the sand and the turquoise water, jewel-like. I felt a new loyalty to my locale from that height. Everyone who lives here should take that flight. I thank my brother David for sending us aloft.

About then, I painted “Roiling Seas 1” and “Roiling Seas 2”. “Roiling Seas 1” shows a deep blue set of squares, each one representing one of the world’s seas. The ropelike forms that I carved into those squares with a knife reveal the warm colors under the blue water. The arrangement of forms creates the illusion of floating in the sea or over it. Those orange-yellow forms suggest knots, but also paths through the water. They even suggest swimmers.

“Roiling Seas 2” is all water and movement and sunlight flickering through the waves. No more distinct forms—everything is all moving at once with flickering optics. It is vibrant and absent all human touch. There is an irony here because it is all made by me through human touch, carving my way to the light beneath.

Jim Ross: At some point, you had to think about what all this was doing to the land itself.

Anne Flash: I started a new piece, “Scorched Earth.” It was about the personal peeling away of elements on the surface of myself that I thought were essential. I wrote those words in red over the sequential imagery. There was still the ocean, but it was thick with reds and hot pinks. All the lines were tangled, almost like the fishing lines that are entangling whales off the coast. The tangled-ness was also the rhythm out of balance—an outward manifestation of what I felt when my own body was out of balance with cancer.

Jim Ross: What role do you believe artists play in directing the attention of the public and of distracted power brokers to the urgency of our predicament?

Anne Flash: I make paintings because it focuses me in a deliberative way in consideration of the present moment. It slows down time. In my studio, I bear witness to a visual world that has its own dynamism. If a color calls out for another color, a bigger area, or more tangled tendrils, I act responsively. A painting has to declare its own relevance. It has arrived in the world—either it illuminates or it fails to legitimize itself. I attend to the work as it leans in one direction or another. I try to stay true to its demands. My titles express aspects of environmental impacts of the winds and oceans. I use my titles to create keys to the subject matter. A title is quite different from a treatise.

Jim Ross: What have you been working on lately?

Anne Flash: I began a series called “Houseboats on the Hudson.” These were inspired by a pit stop I made years ago on a drive to New York City. I sat on this decrepit bank overlooking a filthy, polluted creek or river with dilapidated houseboats on it. I got out my sketchbook and took notes. It struck me as a tad post-apocalyptic. It haunted but also intrigued me. Where was that water headed? Where did the people on those boats end up?  Did they all get lost downstream?

This landscape wasn’t on the coast so it represented a different view for me to latch onto. Its interiority echoed my own interior dialogues: this is a sad, people-less, lonely place, filled with the past, and what had been. The water looked strewn with tangled ropes and tendrils, bits of trash—not a safe place to swim. The latest in the series, “Swim Here,” pulls on the irony of a river that no one will swim in.

My most recent work has taken on both vast and intimate ideas. I recently finished another large piece, “Electric Hand of God,” as an abstract interpretation of a section of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel—the fresco of naked Adam reaching out from a sitting position to be touched by God. I wanted to capture the moment of electricity when Man and God touch each other’s hands and the spark of Creation is made manifest. It reminded me of that sublime impulse experienced by an artist or musician in the act of creation. The world lights up a tiny bit. It is the spark I try to be receptive to in my studio each day. A certain surrender needs to happen, even a sense of desperation. I throw my hands up, and then I see it—a color calls for another. I obey that order.

Since January, I painted about seventy prayer tiles on small linoleum squares. I paired many of them, creating diptychs that people could look at and hold. The imagery was often about just that, being held by a human or higher power. Many land and seascapes emerged as I followed the designs imprinted in many of these tiles by the manufacturer. They are miniature dreamscapes, meant to bless the beholder.
  

  
Jim Ross: Do you see any reason to think you’ll say, this is enough, and return to tranquil seascapes? 

Anne Flash: No, just the opposite. I think my work is headed full tilt into the storm and imbalance. I can’t even imagine going back to water-colored seascapes now. Nothing is solved! And the earth is on fire. Where the land meets the sea is less pastoral and more polemical. That edge feels pretty damn edgy.
 

Learn more about Anne Flash and her work at www.anneflash.com.

Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research. He has published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid work, interviews, and plays in over 200 journals on five continents, including in Atticus Review, Burningword, and Columbia Journal. He particularly enjoys using photos (or other images) and text together to tell stories. He recently wrote and acted in a one-act play and made multiple appearances in a documentary limited series broadcast internationally. Jim and his wife—parents of two health professionals and grandparents of five—split their time between city and mountains.

Header image, “Houseboat on the Hudson River,” 2023, mixed media 5” x 7”, by Anne Flash.