My exhibit "A Place Apart" opens at the West Branch Gallery in Stowe, VT on Saturday, August 25th from 6-8:30 pm. It features sixteen new paintings inspired by the small towns and working landscape of rural Vermont.
You can see the show online
here.
Directions and hours are
here. Please come to the opening and say hello!
About "A Place Apart"
I moved
to Vermont almost twenty years ago for the most impractical of reasons, love at
first sight. Driving through a small town in the southern part of the state, in
the early morning, on my way to somewhere else, I caught a glimpse of a stream
running through the backyard of an old clapboard cape. Suddenly I was back in
my childhood, in a time before the creeks in my own town were culverted and the
yards subdivided. The Vermont I saw from a car window looked like a memory of
home, and I was hooked.
Two
decades later, I’m still attracted to what I see here every day, to our common,
work-a-day patchwork of small towns, dirt roads, village greens, barn yards and
back fields. Looking carefully at these ordinary places, landscape and memory
intersect for me. While I paint, color, light, and shape combine with subject
to compose a mood and a meaning.
In
these paintings, the mood may be melancholy, the meaning ambiguous. Both mood
and meaning in my landscapes—images of old houses, old
farms, old towns, old trucks--have to do with age and time. Like many
Vermonters, I value the old. Even when a barn has outlived its purpose, we
respect its venerable presence and want to see it endure.
The Japanese
concept of “wabi-sabi” has helped me understand why I find these old, ordinary,
and sometimes broken-down places so beautiful. Wabi-sabi embraces the aged, the
imperfect, the modest, the subjective, the natural, the seasonal, the private,
the mysterious. In Vermont, I find wabi-sabi everywhere I look. In my painting,
I find beauty in the ordinary, and try to hold on to the changing, the
disappearing, the memory, and the first glimpse.
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