New Novel Takes Different Tack In Exploring Art

The cover of Rick Fordyce’s “Large Room with Paintings: A Novel” (independently published, 2025) shows an open paint tube with reddish orange paint spewing out.

 There’s something intriguing about that wet gob of paint. One wonders: How will an artist use it? What will it be a part of? And in fact, on the back cover is the question: “Why do humans make art?”

 In an email interview last week Fordyce, who divides his time between Dennis and Seattle, called his new book “a grand statement, really, about art and mental health. I have been an ‘amateur’ painter all my life, and once accidentally found myself alone in the Impressionist room at the MFA,” that is, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. “This sparked the novel.”

 “Large Room with Paintings” is a hefty novel at 458 pages. The book is divided into three smaller sections: The Paintings, The Room, and The Visit. “The Paintings” essentially describes, in vignettes that are short and story-like in form, the circumstances in which six Impressionistic paintings were painted. In this section we meet the late 19th century painters Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cezanne and the lesser-known Alfred Sisley, a British artist who lived in France. We witness each painter creating a famous work. At the end of the section we learn something of the chain of ownership of each painting. All of the paintings eventually end up in the MFA.

 In the second section of the book, “The Room,” we meet a cast of characters living in Boston in the early 20th century. The story revolves around a “society woman,” Marian Lawrence, who is studying art, and a recently arrived immigrant, Franz Shultz. After a brief, doomed dalliance, Marian and Franz marry other people and move on with their lives.

 Here’s how the pair fit into the larger story suggested by the book’s title: Franz is by trade a plasterer, and using Marian’s good reference, in 1915 he works on a room in the MFA’s new Evans Wing where the French Impressionists will eventually be displayed. In the section’s final scene, Franz is alone in that room gazing at the paintings.

 The third section of the book takes up nearly half of its pages. For Cape Codders, this part will be of particular interest as it describes a hippie-era Cape Cod that, if it exists at all these days, can only be found in hidden pockets of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. And art. Of course, art.

 The section takes place over a 30-year span between 1972 and roughly 2002 in the Orleans and Eastham area. Here we meet a wide swath of eccentric oddballs clustered around the Devine orchard whose barn has been turned into an art gallery. Carl Ivy, who has fled Charlestown because he owed his pot dealer money, reappears through the pages as he builds a business selling drugs in “the Cape’s less competitive cannabis trade.” Then he becomes a sculptor.

 The larger story line comes full circle when Carl enters the Impressionist room at the MFA and finds himself alone with the paintings that are now a century old. He has a kind of transcendent experience in the room. He thinks, “It’s beautiful.”

 Fordyce, who was born in 1952 in Seattle, grew up in that city. In the 1970s, when Fordyce was in his late 20s, he joined the Peace Corps and taught high school math and English in Ghana, West Africa. He moved to Cape Cod for a job in 1985. Fordyce, who has a degree in psychology from the University of Washington, had been looking for a change, but after seven or eight months, when the job didn't pan out, he hitched his wagon to the construction boom and for many years made a living from a small roofing and siding business, an occupation he said was ideal for a writer as its seasonal nature left him free to write during the winter. He lived in Chatham from 1988 to 1997 and again from 2000 to 2013. His partner is the silversmith Teresa Ellis Cetto, a jewelry designer and craftswoman with a studio on Cape Cod.

Fordyce’s first novel was “Glen,” which followed a Vietnam veteran after he returned to the U.S. as a civilian. He wrote “Large Room,” his fifth book, between 2011 and 2017. He has completed an additional novel based in the Pacific Northwest.

Along the way Fordyce was nominated for a prestigious Pushcart Prize given to work published in small and independent presses. All of his work is self-published. “Fortunately, I’m now part of a Seattle authors’ group who attends the many summer festivals and Sunday markets of the Seattle area, where sales more than cover the cost of publishing the books,” Fordyce says.

 Fordyce will sign copies of “Large Room with Paintings” at Yellow Umbrella Books in Chatham on Friday, Dec. 5 from 1 to 3 p.m. For more information, call the store at 508-945-0144.