Summer Splash

There is a moment every summer that belongs entirely to the young — that instant at the edge of a boat deck when the water is below and the sky is above and the only thing left to do is jump. Nancy Cicchetti has caught that moment and held it still inside an oil painting, and in doing so has made it last forever. The scene is drawn from somewhere she has been, somewhere a camera was raised and a shutter clicked, but the painting is something else entirely. The boy with his arms thrown skyward, the small figure already tumbling headfirst, the girls standing at the rail deciding — each one is a different relationship to courage, to summer, to the particular freedom that lives only at the edge of a jump. Cicchetti painted their backs and their movement, not their faces, and that choice opens the door wide: the viewer steps in, remembers their own dock, their own summer, their own moment of letting go. The water below is not simply blue. It is every shade of a bay in high summer, green and teal and deep, rippled by light and wind and the disturbance of bodies entering it with joy. The sky above is wide and generous. This is a painting about the exact feeling of being alive in a body on a beautiful day, and Nancy Cicchetti has made it shimmer.