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The Gallery at Jimmy's Presents The Alchemy of a Life: Selected Works by Thorpe Feidt

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Published
06/21/2025 by

This summer, The Gallery at Jimmy's invites guests to experience The Alchemy of a Life, a powerful and intimate retrospective of painter Thorpe Feidt (1940–2024). The exhibition opens with a public reception on Wednesday, July 3 at 6 PM, featuring a live performance by The Alchemy 5, an interpretive jazz quintet featuring musicians from The Orchestra on the Hill. It remains on exhibit through August 22 and will culminate in a special immersive orchestral concert on August 10 at Jimmy's Jazz & Blues Club, performed by The Orchestra on the Hill and inspired directly by Feidt's work.

Feidt's celebrated series The Ambiguities—named after Herman Melville's novel Pierre, or The Ambiguities—spanned more than four decades and over 450 paintings. An artist, teacher, and thinker based in Ipswich, MA, Feidt explored themes of alchemy, jazz, literature, and revision, often reworking canvases across decades. His later pieces, created after his diagnosis with vascular dementia in 2018, speak to a continued urgency of expression even as memory faded.

Thorpe's widow, Pat Gray-Feidt, spoke to the emotional depth behind these late works. She explained how the paintings evolved alongside his condition; "Thorpe didn't stop creating. As his dementia increased, he started painting over his early works with black and white. These images show the progression of his disease," she stated.

These later paintings—layered, bold, and often abstract—appear alongside key earlier works, offering a full-circle view of a life lived in deep conversation with art and sound. A unique feature of The Alchemy of a Life exhibition is the series of original jazz compositions created by The Alchemy 5 - each one inspired by an individual painting in the collection. Visitors can access these interpretive soundscapes by scanning the QR code displayed beside each canvas, offering a layered, multisensory experience that brings Thorpe Feidt's work to life through music.

The exhibition is curated by Michael Labrie, whose vision for The Gallery at Jimmy's has transformed it into a cornerstone for contemporary art in downtown Portsmouth. Labrie, an artist and photographer himself, curated this exhibition not only to honor Feidt's visual language but also to amplify the emotional and musical undercurrent that runs through his work. "Thorpe's work resonates between his visual storytelling and the jazz rhythms that inspired him. It's not only a tribute to his creative spirit and the ways in which art and music can move through each other, but also a reflection of how his perspective shifted in later years - shaped, but never silenced, by the challenges he faced."

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