Ed Beem blogs about the exhibition Marsden Hartley: Soliloquy in Dogtown at the Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Massachusetts, on view through October 14, 2012.

Beem writes: "Regarded as the province of vagabonds, prostitutes, witches and feral dogs, Dogtown is just the sort of place that fires the artist's imagination… Hartley's interpretation of Dogtown runs toward the Expressionist take on regionalism that defined his later work, the heaviness of both the Expressionist style and palette and of the Dogtown erratics worked out in bold, black outline. His drawings sketch the scruffy contours of the twisted and torqued landscape with particular attention to local landmarks such as the Whale's Jaw, a split pair of boulders that resemble the maw of a leviathan."