A graceful ripple of Provincetown sand might slip into the intimate boxes Elspeth Halvorsen Vevers created. So might a sliver of wharf, a shell of a horseshoe crab, or a tiny table she constructed.
The essence of Cape Cod’s far tip coursed through her three-dimensional sculptural collages — small dioramas she kept making until becoming ill last year.
“I feel that as artists we are blessed: We never ‘retire’ and in the joy of creating, we may rediscover our lost paradises,” she wrote in a statement that accompanied a Provincetown Art Association and Museum survey of her work, in 2013.
Ms. Halvorsen, who had called Provincetown home for more than six decades, died Nov. 17 in the home she and her husband, Tony Vevers, had purchased from the artist Mark Rothko in 1963. She was 90 and had been diagnosed with mesothelioma a year and a half ago.
Having outlived her siblings and her husband, who also was an artist, she wrote that she “often confronted the urge to become a hermit, remote, vulnerable to the weight and magnitude of sorrow.”
Time spent outside her home or inside her studio, which was as compact as her creations, eased that burden.
“When I surrender myself to solving the problems and intricacies of these somewhat labor intensive, architectural constructions; or to planting in the garden, moving trees or mending fences; I escape the gloom and find the revival that only ongoing creating can provide,” she wrote for the 2013 exhibition, which she dedicated to her husband, who died in 2008.
Her work drew praise from critics, and from those for whom purchasing one of her boxes meant more than just buying a work of art.
Robert J. Lifton, a psychiatrist who owns a piece called “Gothic Picnic,” said the box “has iconic significance in my life.”
“Each time I begin the meeting on psychology and history which I convene annually, I have it hanging in view in my study,” he wrote in a note included in the Provincetown Art Association catalog for the 2013 show, “An Intimate Cosmos.”
“I point to its chairs at the empty table and the mysterious ball of light above,” he added. “It signifies for us the beginning of our task, that of filling the emptiness with words and ideas in a quest for illumination.”
Ms. Halvorsen’s “surreal box constructions read like poetry: concise, lyrical, and sown with symbols and metaphors that, together with subtle light and confined space, create odd and tender openings in the viewer’s imagination,” Globe critic Cate McQuaid wrote about an exhibition last year at Provincetown’s Berta Walker Gallery, which has represented Ms. Halvorsen since 2003.
These evocative boxes were carefully created “in a modest studio with modest materials,” said her daughter Tabitha Vevers, who divides her time between Wellfleet and Cambridge, and who, like her parents, is an artist.
Inside the studio, nearly everything was within arm’s reach as Ms. Halvorsen stood at her work table, which Tabitha said “had a patina of all the things she’d done before” — drippings of glue, drops of paint, flecks of sand.
“Here she is creating these works about the cosmos, the expanse of space, but she contains it in these boxes,” Tabitha said. The expanse of Ms. Halvorsen’s extensive career and inventive mind, meanwhile, could fit in a studio so small “it’s almost analogous to her work.”
Ms. Halvorsen’s economical approach to choosing the materials and tools she used harkened to tight financial times in her youth.
“This frugality also had a lot to do with her thinking in general,” said her other daughter, Stephanie Vevers, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Provincetown.
“She didn’t buy anything she didn’t need,” Stephanie added. “She was such a conservationist she didn’t have to think about recycling because she didn’t create waste in the first place.”
Living in a house that “is like a museum in a way,” Ms. Halvorsen “was completely herself,” Stephanie said. “I told somebody recently she’s the most ‘herself’ person I’ve ever met.”
Born on Feb. 23, 1929, Elspeth Halvorsen was a daughter of Arthur Halvorsen, a Norwegian immigrant who was a chemist and inventor, and Colette Finch Pratt. Ms. Halvorsen was a teenager when her father died.
Her mother and maternal grandmother were artists, and after high school Ms. Halvorsen lived in Manhattan’s East Village in New York City, studying at the Art Students League and the New School for Social Research. She also lived for a time in Paris, where she studied art at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
She and her mother visited Maine’s Monhegan Island in the summer of 1953 and attended a dance the first night. Tony Vevers, clad in a cowboy hat, kerchief, and cowboy boots, walked in with two friends.
“My mother said something like, ‘The Three Musketeers: which one do you like?’ And I said, ‘The cowboy, the one in the middle,’ ” Ms. Halvorsen told Susan Rand Brown for a 2013 profile in Provincetown Arts magazine. “The next thing I knew, Tony came over to ask me to dance. Six weeks later, we were married.”
They lived in an unheated loft in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and moved to Provincetown after Stephanie was born. The couple purchased Rothko’s house in 1963, the year Tony took a teaching post at Purdue University in Indiana. The family divided time between Provincetown and Purdue, where Ms. Halvorsen finished her bachelor’s in fine arts.
She formerly was active with the Group Gallery, run by artists, and was a cofounder and former president of Rising Tide Gallery. In addition, she taught free-form assemblage and clay sculpture to children.
Her art, meanwhile, had earlier included black and white photography, along with ceramic sculpture, which became part of her dioramas. One day in Indiana, she noticed a friend experimenting with a three-dimensional box.
“I went home and immediately started making constructions: It was a revelation, the possibilities seemed infinite, and I’ve been doing it ever since,” she said in the Provincetown Arts interview.
Her friend Mary Ann Caws, distinguished professor emerita and resident professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, called Ms. Halvorsen’s constructions “deeply personal in their linking of nature, emotion, and culture — they are even more movingly reminders of the intellectual climate, as well as the singular monuments and the weather, water, and sky of Provincetown.”
A memorial celebration of her life and work will be announced for Ms. Halvorsen, whose daughters are her only immediate survivors.
“Elspeth Halvorsen is to visual arts as Emily Dickinson is to poetry: the voice of heavenly and cathedral tunes,” Rand Brown began her piece in Provincetown Arts.
In an e-mail, Caws wrote that “something about her way of looking reminds me about why some of us devote our underlying (or at times overlying) passion to whatever we deem most poetic: Elspeth never lacked in, and indeed represented, the art of poetry.”
In her artist’s note for the 2013 exhibition, Ms. Halvorsen wrote that she was trying “to create a meditative space in which the viewer may wander.”
“Though the works in this exhibition may seem spare,” she added, “they are intensely intimate, in my wish to express a boundless reverence for the glory and mystery of the cosmos.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.