Forester Blue and Friendly Broom Head

I just spied a full white moon rising below my tall house. I turned
the lights off so I could better appreciate its luminous company the
most comforting I have had all day. My day ended with a pleasant walk
with the doggies down the newly polished logging trail .The loggers
have done an immaculate job...hardly a sign of debris save a few
softly shredded limbs making fodder for the new woodland bed. It was
such a sparkly day out with a still wind and warm sunshine encouraging
my weary winter bound spirit. I picked up a small fragment of white
pine bark brushed with Forester blue....perhaps this discovery of
colored tension is waking me up from a week long malaise where I have
had no strength to engage my artistic powers. I have also been
asthmatic which I finally saw a doctor for last Friday. I must be a
tad bit lonely these days as I entertained an unexpected visual
dialog with a broom. Sunday afternoon as I pulled close to the wood
stove fire with the doggies on my lap the bright green head of a
synthetic broom outside the window stabbed in the snow was quite
compelling. Its close proximity and similar height to my own scruffy
head seemed like a reasonable candidate for a chat. Today, I made a
selection of six paintings for the upcoming group exhibit
"Resonance of Place " scheduled for April at Gross McCleaf Gallery ,
Philadelphia .Tomorrow I will bring them to my framer in time to
transport to the gallery en route to Baltimore, a planned trip at the
end of this month.

Immense AoA Gratitude

I remade my proposal sketch for Marriage : American Split four
times in preparation for last Fridays final oral presentation for AoA
in Montpelier and it is still very much a work in progress. This theme
was one of five other interrelated themes I proposed which also
resulted in endless redoing . But for me the content based on Gay
Marriage is the most significant.The challenge of designing this piece
is twofold: the placement of three distinct pairs of figures and using
formal symbols / metaphors to consider the division and controversy
over same sex marriage in Vermont. Trying to unify these disparate and
particular elements has been an enormous stretch for me taking my
usual mode of executing work into unknown territory. As I have said
before, I am reasonably comfortable drawing the figure. However,
painting the figure on a larger scale with detailed specificity will
begin will require enormous experimentation and perseverance. I have
no formula for such descriptive painting and I suppose I never will. I
am very excited to have this opportunity and challenge ahead of me and
believe it will launch my work into a new personal direction. Ultimately I think the impact of a painting has mysterious origins and the content never precedes artistic form but in the case
of Marriage :American Split I was inspired by Harvey Milks voice on
Civil rights issues.

I was very well organized for my oral presentation but perhaps was
overly obsessive about presenting too many ideas. I had ten minutes in
which to present my materials and instead of keeping it simple I
burdened myself as well as the panelists with a lot of visuals. I was
like a whirling dervish trying to cover my wall of art work
representing 8 portrait sketches,6 (30x40 ) charcoal/pastel drawings,
2 (31x31) oil paintings and a host of art historical influences.
Never the less I was sincere and emphatic in my expression and though
I would have preferred to have freed myself up from my materials and
simply talk from my heart I still managed to effectively communicate.

Immediately following my presentation my heart sank because I thought
I had shot myself in the foot by a rather crude detail I exampled for
Marriage: American Split. I risked sharing a bumper sticker slogan I
frequently saw in Windham County during the creation of the Civil
Union in Vermont. It reads as follows: "Real Vermonters shovel shit ,
they don't pack it". I was especially alarmed because of the eight
panelist four were men and upon question/answer time they remained
stone silent. In contrast to the chatty discourse with which they
engaged other artists I was convinced I had hit against a conservative
wall.

I was quite upset by this over the weekend until upon sharing my
concern with Reverend Thomas Brown he asked was I in integrity with
the content of the quote I had shared? I thought not entirely
.......that I was recognizing a deep seated fear and shame within
myself about the vivid and graphic words described by the slogan and I
was projecting my discomfort onto the panelists.

I learned that never was there a mention about the slogan or any
concern over the Gay Marriage motif. But rather, given a commission
to execute four of the six themes, I was asked to exclude Schools:
Inside Roof Trusses. The panelists felt that I would need to be
present to explain to the public how the points of the triangular
truss pointed to the battle over fiscal turf between locals, state and
federal government. I think that this is a mute point and that the
classic stature of the carpenter with hammer and nail rising out of
the golden stack of Roof Trusses was a dynamic image and one
reminiscent of a laborer conceived by Diego Rivera. I think I will
execute this theme as a painting any way and perhaps donate it as an
additional part of the suite.

Harvey Milk Recruited Me

Last Friday, after running some errands in Northampton, Massachusetts, I discovered that I was an hour away from the showing of Milk at the Pleasant Street Theatre. In November of 1977, when Harvey Milk’s life was cut short by murder, I was a junior in high school, and oblivious to the gay civil rights movement that had been welling up since long before Stonewall. Even though I was dealing with my own silent battles with my sexual orientation, there was no other culture of people in my school or in my hometown off of whom to bounce this idea of self-discovery. I did not hear about his life or his death until almost a decade later. By then I was member of the Front Runners, a gay running group that had membership in all of the major cities nationwide. As the gay pride parade in New York City would move up, we would sprint a half-block and stop, as onlookers would cheer. We would start at Columbus Circle and then end up in the Village. I marched – but did not run – in Philly’s parades, as well, which were still outrageous and fun! :P

On the first day of high school, I did, however, connect immediately with a classmate named Joey. I walked into the music room where he was playing the piano and singing an Elton John song. He was an extremely talented musician, and he was as passionate about Barbra Streisand as I was about Judy Garland. On Saturdays, we would take the train into Harvard Square and spend hours at the Harvard Coop, finding excellent records at Strawberries. We would then enjoy a drink at the juice bar across the street. Joey and I were kindred spirits in an academic and social pressure cooker where we found within our time spent together great acceptance and great joy. We made our commitment to our art first and foremost before academic requirements.

One of our most memorable adventures was a bus trip to New York City, during which we saw the musical, The Act, featuring Liza Minnelli. We were somewhat disappointed, as her appearances in the show seemed to be few and far between, as opposed to those of dozens of male acrobats.

I last saw Joey in LA, and hope that he is alive and well.

On the one hand, I feel incredibly fortunate to be part of a generation that was part of the gay civil rights revolution, and had as much support as we did, even with the devastating outbreak of AIDS. But still, in viewing Milk, I couldn’t believe that he as a civic leader, as well as his movement, were not a part of my consciousness in the height of my adolescence. For this, I feel very sad, but his spirit is still very much alive today, and has given me a renewed sense of pride and self-acceptance in an era where sexual orientation (among other normal human differences) is still such a bone of contention.

During the movie, Harvey Milk was portrayed as asking his audience at the beginning of a speaking engagement, “can I recruit you?” Yes, Harvey, you can. Thank you.

A Halifax Prima Donna and Theodore Dreiser's Lover

Yesterday afternoon, I scheduled a portrait session with Dorothy Christie, who reluctantly agreed to sit for me. She kept insisting that there were others better suited for sketching as, she complained, “I am such an old hag.” She has large, wild black eyes and a striped thick mane of white hair. I loved the black hairband worn behind a crest of hair pulled back from the center of her distinct widow’s peak.

Since so many of us in Halifax Center do not have televisions - or a satellite dish with which to operate one - we gathered at Dorothy’s center chimney cape to watch the recent Presidential Debates. Born in 1923 - the year my paternal grandparents were married - in New Haven, Connecticut, Dorothy majored in English at the University of Connecticut, and received her Masters in English from Yale. Ten of us gathered closely together in her cozy living room, furnished with charming antiques, and piled high with books. Sipping on a variety of festive drinks, we settled in on the flashing blue political screen; however, I was distracted by the many oil paintings that filled the walls. They were painted by her father, a devoted regionalist artist, Frederick Lester Sexton, who was predominantly a landscape painter associated with the Old Lyme Connecticut School. I especially liked a small painting of a dark, maroon house obscured by a woodland, with just the back end of a long black ‘39 Packard barely visible. Positively fired up over Obama, Dorothy seized every other comment made by Republicans, and volleyed them with vociferous insults. Justifiably so; she taught in various departments at Vassar College (Russian Drama in English, Assistant Librarian in the Music Library), where her husband was also a tenured professor of English for forty years. She also taught an evening division at Duchess Community College, mostly to Vietnam veterans in the 1970s.

Coincidentally, Dorothy and her husband bought her house in Halifax in 1959 from Kyra Markham, one of the progressive artists in Vermont history. According to Dorothy, Kyra was a prima donna, “very opinionated and conscious of herself,” an actress from way back. Kyra was tall and striking with piercing black eyes. Even though she smoked like a chimney she weathered well. Born Elaine Bushnell, she went to Mrs. Brown's Theatre in Chicago, where she then changed her name to Kyra Markham. Kyra was very good to Oscar Cody, an elderly Halifax farmer, and Paul Derry, the local plumber, who, incidentally at the age of ninety-two, helped me to locate my well with a divining rod, a thin branch from my fruit tree (he was only eighteen inches away form the exact spot). According to Dorothy, Kyra made no class distinction, appreciating people for who they were.

Kyra Markham performed with Joseph Cotton, and was Theodore Dreiser's (author of American Tragedy and The Titan) passionate lover. Kyra gave Dorothy a manuscript written by Theo, in which Kyra herself figures as the character Stephanie Platoff. Dorothy said she gave this manuscript to the Halifax Historical Society and they lost it, as well as a mural by Kyra left behind in the house. “I remember in 1978, we had an exhibit of historical treasures in the church in the center, and we were robbed. They took everything on loan from me: two or three crazy quilts with a million colors, fagoted, and blanket-stitched together, an early blue-and-white hand-blown cobalt blue vase, my great aunt’s silver spoons which had been buried during the revolution by Tories to protect them from the Red Coats.”

Kyra later married Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, a union in which Frank was apparently instrumental in breaking up. After subsequent marriages, Kyra moved to Haiti, where she “bought a rotten house that fell down. She did everything under the sun: weaving, sculpture, but considered herself a painter.” Kyra eventually died in Haiti.

Also, prominent among Dorothy’s trio of friends was Norma Millay, sister of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was on stage together with Kyra Markham.

Dorothy’s husband, a native Vermonter, brought her to Halifax during the summer months, where his father had been a minister in the neighboring town of Marlboro for fifty years. They thought this environment would be how they would engage their three sons during the summer, as opposed to sending them to overnight camp. She described how, as a boy of eleven, her husband was swinging on a strap from one hay mound to the next when, suddenly, he fell on the strap, and had to have his right arm amputated.

A little sidetracked, we hit briefly on the Honora Winery, which is a sore topic of discussion for Dorothy. “Winery comes in…practically greases their palm [the Select Board]. Honora always giving something to the town to get in their good graces.”

Dorothy abruptly reminded me about the "Brick House" in Whitingham, of which her description had totally captivated my imagination when last we spoke in September. I could not believe I had forgotten this treasure because I am obsessed with old, derelict houses - especially elegant ones. “You take Brick House Road on your right after the general store, and go all the way to the end. Goes back to the early eighteenth century. There are cut stone lintels over the windows, and you will see a swing hanging from a tree with chains grown into the bark. A lady lived there from California who was an alcoholic in the worst way, she just lived there and drank.”

It is always such a challenge to draw persons who are wearing glasses, the magnified distortion of their eyeballs popping out from underneath the frames. Dorothy’s right eye was extremely large, and both eyes were set in great deep wells of reddish-brown. To this, I responded with a fairly strong use of red, which, against a bright orange paper ground, proved very effective. I was so looking forward to shaving in swaths of brilliant white to compliment her great white coif but I dropped my white chalk in water and it softened into a soggy mush. However, a pale lavender pastel stick substituted nicely. Nearing completion, I showed her my drawing efforts. “Aaaugh!” she shrieked, “You made me look like an old hag! Your drawing of my lips makes me look so cranky…It’s like when my granddaughter says, ‘Grandma, you have such a slimy mouth when George Bush comes on the TV.’ You bastard cow!”

NB: George Bush, not David Brewster, is the bastard cow of which she spoke.

Andrew Wyeth's Passing & N.C. Wyeth's Demijohn

I was profoundly impacted when I learned of Andrew Wyeth’s passing at the end of last week. He was a major influence on my artistic interests, especially as a young boy. I suppose this was because I grew up in similar landscapes as his. He celebrated the antiquity and authenticity of a vanishing farmscape that I, too, loved. In fact, in the fall of 1979, when I was attending the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia, I rented the third-floor of an apartment belonging to Andrew Wyeth’s cousin, who gave me the artist’s phone number. After first writing him a rather endearing letter, in which I shared what I presumed to be mutual sensibilities, I invited him to go gathering crayfish in the small streams that are so characteristic of the Brandywine River area.

When I didn’t hear from him, I telephoned him; he answered the phone. He had a high-pitched, Anglo-American voice and said that he had appreciated my letter, but unfortunately, he had just had a hip replacement and would be sadly unable to accept my invitation to pull crustaceans out of a stream.

This was not my first encounter with the Wyeth family; for example, his son Jamie and I attended the same debutante party at the Brandywine River Museum* in my nineteenth year. The thing that most distinguishes this party for me, however, is the escapade I had with another party attendee on the banks of the Brandywine during the festivities - a guy who subsequently sent mooning French-language telegrams to my parents’ house - so I’ve merely mentioned this Wyeth encounter here for completeness.

For me, much more significant than Andrew Wyeth’s exceptional/phenomenal artistic abilities is the fact that he represented and recorded in his art an epoch of Chester County, Pennsylvania, when the small-farming heritage and culture of that region was still totally intact. Now, such mysteries are only sentimentalized by artists, at best.

I think that Andrew Wyeth is an excellent drafter, and I most love his quickly executed drawings/watercolors done directly from life. His work always evokes, for me, the month of March, during which the mid-Atlantic region experiences the beginning of Spring. The earth smells rich, and is a deep muddy green. Flocks of grackles and blackbirds usher in the season’s new prospects. There’s this lingering twilight when one feels as if anything is possible.






* The museum, housed in an eighteenth-century brick gristmill, is a favorite place to go, and also contains a robust collection of N.C. Wyeth’s work, including a 1924 painting titled The Dusty Bottle that features a large olive-green glass demijohn. I’ve always admired the heavily impastoed painting of the reflective light, suggesting a window, on the bottle’s surface. As a young lad of twelve, I babysat for a family that owned a stunning demijohn encircled in wickerwork that was in a ruined part of their rambling farmhouse; because of my love for Wyeth’s painting, I asked the family if I could have the green glass bottle in lieu of babysitting money. I still have that glorious demijohn to this day.

A Portrait of a Fifth-Generation Logging Brother

Aarin and Sean Dupuis are brothers from a family of fifth-generation loggers. For several months, they will be cutting trees below my house. Before sunrise, I see them drive by on their way to work, and sometimes even upon their return at night, before five o’clock. On Monday, I snow-shoed through four short rows of ancient, twisted apple trees confined as if in a room, which my neighbor Ramie refers to as the “Chekhov Orchard.” Just beyond this intimate fruit land, on the other side of a wall of poplars, I encountered the roaring engine of a skidder moving in reverse and echoed by a more distant, muffled chain saw. The engine turned off, Aarin Dupuis stepped out of the iron-grilled coach, and we made friendly introductions. I asked him if he would sit for a portrait after work, which, last night (Thursday), he did. But what I did not learn during our first meeting is that his brother Sean worked closely alongside him, and walked into my house, too, as if he were his older brother’s guardian angel, and indeed he was. Statistically, logging is the most dangerous job; both brothers were protectors for their brother Micah, who logged with them until he was struck and killed last year in a logging accident. Aarin gave his youngest brother CPR for nearly three hours, but Micah was already dead as soon as that tree fell.

Aarin is quite handsome, and given the clarity of his thoughts, self-confidence, and commitment to his family, I was surprised to learn that he was only twenty-eight. I was even more surprised by his upright composure, which he maintained steadily during the portrait sitting. A week before Thanksgiving, his mother - a Jehovah’s Witness - stopped by my house to share about her Kingdom Hall in Jacksonville, Vermont. I saw immediately how he had his mother’s sad and tender eyes. Furthermore, I was not prepared for the steadfast gaze that his loving eyes cast my way as I thrashed about with great intensity, carving out his portrait with charcoal and pastel. I was deeply moved by our unspoken communication, a silent rapport between a Forester and a flatlander artist.

Days before our scheduled meeting, I excitedly considered the blue-colored paper ground that I would use to make his portrait, in order to bring out Aarin's orange helmet and ivory-black ear muffs, complete with antenna. Aarin talked adroitly and expertly about the business of forestry and felling trees. He answered my questions about protecting vernal pools, brooks, historic landmarks, and stone walls. He explained his meaning of “Basal Area,” which, for example, is cutting only 40% of the canopy fifty feet on either side of a brook. He continued, “We take extensive measures to protect young growth, and to ensure that only mature trees are cut. That huge red oak that you admired has a humongous top, which holds out sunlight for anything that grows underneath. By cutting, now you have a hole in the canopy, which is excellent for wildlife. It is like a deer magnet: they like to bed down in the cut hemlock tops, especially in winter. Deer follow the cutting path to eat the soft part of bud tips. And to think, we have this reputation of being tobacco-chewing, beer-drinking, bearded hillbillies that ravage and pillage forests!”

Their grandfather, Ovid (that’s two unrelated Ovids in two sequential blog posts), used to say, “A good skidder driver is a good cutter, and a good cutter makes a good driver.” Felling trees is completely determined by the path and maneuvering of the skidder. Aarin confirmed his grandfather’s words, “Good to keep sharp on both areas of cutting and pulling a cable.” Earlier, he had explained how in the woods, his brother’s life “is in my hands and mine is in his.” And all the while, his brother Sean sat on the sofa, watching and listening intently to my questions and scratchy drawing efforts. Blocked by my drawing board, I couldn't directly see his face. However, I would periodically look over and around my work to see Sean still there, like an attentive bird or sentinel.

As we caught each other’s eyes I struggled to achieve a rightness of drawing around his right lid, and then suddenly I saw it; knocking a flicker of orange into the corner of his eye, the portrait was complete. For an hour and half, it felt like I had adopted two new brothers. Aarin concluded our session by plainly stating, “I hate to say it…I never know when I am coming home...I do everything I can to take good care of my boys.”

Hind Paws Spinning & The Shih Tzus of Rubber Lips

I remade (for the second time this week) a drawing for the Art of Action, Schools: Inside Roof Trusses. A figure is prominently featured in this composition, and it took me a while to recognize that I needed a more simplified and brighter sky to make that figure stand out. I want to achieve an iconic form, not only representing a local carpenter, but also emphasizing the interrelation between all the key shapes throughout the visual design. In some ways, unlike my landscape paintings, I wanted less atmosphere dissolving the forms, and I also wanted to establish more clear, solid shapes defined by hard edges. But still the atmosphere seeped in, and softened, punctured several edges. Perhaps that will be an asset of having spent so many years painting outdoors; while I’m indoors painting a more intellectual idea, if it gets too precious or too contrived, I have no problems breaking it down with my imagination and with nature’s verve.

In the studio each morning, I feel a little bit like a dog upon first starting out on a walk, abruptly pausing to dig up the earth with my hind paws spinning, trying to initiate a cloud of dusty grass, ‘til off I go. Except unlike my sojourns in the grand outdoors, the shuffling and reordering of the lesser indoors is not quite the same for me. Not the idle pleasure of clearing a level place for my tripod easel, or hunting for flat rocks to prop up one of its legs; none of the meditative opportunities for connecting to something much greater then myself to help me transition into actually starting to paint. Though I love my studio, which I built out of the upper loft of a post-and-beam barn, its raftered cathedral ceiling, architectural details, and my walls of art are distracting! So I am trying to adapt to a new set of rituals required by painting indoors, such as moving tables, listening to music, and availing myself to a wide array of art books, prints, and my own piles of sketches to launch me into work.

Actually, having the flexibility to work just as comfortably indoors as outdoors has been a great yearning of mine. Setting up an outdoor studio day after day and battling the elements can be a Herculean task, and one that at times forfeits a greater need for reflection and refinement. I think my middle age is beginning to better prepare me for the possibilities of painting in a controlled environment then anything else.

However, I really do feel excitement about the great possibilities looming ahead from studio work. It will allow me to be more experimental with certain visual ideas driven by materials and techniques that my "oil painting machine " prohibits. It will also require a certain level of trust as I strip away certain visual structures that I have grown accustomed to and come closer to an art form that is perhaps essentially linked to my human experience.

Also, after two months of scheduling and rescheduling, I finally had the chance to draw my neighbor who frequently drives past my house waving with four scruffy Shih Tzus barking hysterically out both cab windows. Born in late November of 1929 in Newport, Vermont, my neighbor cuts a formidable figure; when I first moved to Halifax ten years ago, he was afraid I might jump his bones and gave me the middle finger as he drove past me. But seven years ago when I trapped a fisher cat that had eviscerated my beloved dog Jamir, I called him to shoot the wild sniper that had killed my dog, and we have gotten along very well ever since. My neighbor has a deep, husky voice like that of his mother Malvina, and is a hard worker like his father Ovid, both of whom had unique names of which he is quite proud. Both of his parents made grain alcohol with a man named Valentine Russ, a red-headed carpenter, who made it in a pressure cooker along the shores of Lake Memphremagog. His father moved the family to Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1939. There, he worked in a bobbin mill.

From the age of eleven through sixteen, Rubber Lips, as he is known, worked for 35 cents an hour on a chicken farm. He spoke quickly and frequently about his years of hard work at various mills in central Massachusetts. “At age sixteen to eighteen, I was a trucker up in Whitinsville, Mass, driving bolster machine parts around the factory. At eighteen, I drilled holes in shuttles for a textile business.” His large blue eyes, magnified by his glasses, were full of animated expression as he peeled back memories that rolled freely off his magnificent white beard. He said, “I have a ‘Strong Back and Weak Mind’…I never had more then an eighth grade education!” Upon retirement in the mid-1980s, he was earning $18.50 an hour. In 1955, he joined the carpenters union, Local 107, in South Worcester; Rubber Lips said, “they had my hands over my head:” he specialized in installing drop-ceilings in numerous factories. He put ceilings in for Dapol Plastics, a company that made plastic bowls, and also ITEK in Bedford, which made lenses for satellites. He just kept on talking, and in an even more graveled tone than before described how in the 1960's they developed asbestos, which he and his co-workers sprayed into buildings before putting up the drop-ceilings; about their resulting labored breathing, he said, “some guys couldn't blow at all - one guy couldn't even get going.”

Rubber Lips loves the ocean, and occasionally during our portrait session, I would be startled by a sound that was sort of like whispering steam. It was his clock chiming in the half hour with a recorded sound of ocean surf. He also loves SCUBA diving! He tried to get into the Navy in 1946, but, “they didn't want me, said I had too much sugar in my blood...bullshit. The real reason was because I had only an eighth-grade education...I said fuck it...I was always a hard worker and a swimmer, too.” Despite his work ethic, his first wife would only allow him to have one six-pack a week.

Rubber Lips never stopped talking, each of his amazing memories punctuated with an exact date. He didn't hesitate to tell me sad family trials and tribulations, a story filled with three children whose lives ended in great personal tragedy, every detail from a son’s stabbing to another’s overdose at age thirty-one. He has a grandson, William Wayne, from his fifty-eight-year-old daughter Roberta; he said that his grandson has currently “met up with some snapper from Pennsylvania.”

“Yeah,” he said gruffly, “they call me ‘Rubber Lips’ because I talk like hell! I remember the 1950's Burly Show in old Scollay Square over there in Boston. Now there was Sally Keith...! She could twist a tassel on her tits...one on each side...she could make them tassels go on each cheek, too!”

Intellectual Indoors, or Windswept Treasure Outside?

Now that the Art of Action written proposal has been submitted, I feel as if I am embarking upon a new chapter as far as refining all of my topic narratives for this project. It doesn't really matter that ultimately my proposal may not be selected, but what does matter is that I bring to resolution and some artistic unity to the preparatory sketches I have already made. I feel a renewed sense of enthusiasm and clarity about how I wish to design and execute the compositional designs. The process of tightening the visual design through an ever growing legacy of generations of drawings is becoming very exciting.

This very intellectual ordeal comes in the height of Winter, which forces me indoors in my studio, where I must work. I am actually taking advantage of this opportunity to paint in a studio to overcome my fear of producing semi-contrived creative encounters. Historically, I am so thoroughly devoted to painting outdoors that I have typically felt restless and cooped-up while working indoors. I have found my collection of books, oil cans, tacked pictures, and stacks of drawings to be suffocating, and I long to journey outdoors and run off and explore. I wish to stumble upon some fabulous windswept treasure, and, there, connect soulfully to its transfigurative form, submitting my will to paint more completely with each passing hour until there is no longer any daylight in which to see.

Ah....now, there is the exhilaration from such a rendez-vous, and of course traveling home with the pink light of twilight that makes me feel alive and well.

Tip Top Gathering and Partir Est Mourir un Peu

I was nervous about attending the Art of Action soirée at the Tip Top on Saturday evening among such a large group of artists who I knew mostly only by name. Not to mention the silent context shimmering with personal hopes and fears, spiced with an undercurrent of competition. But that is why I chose to go, because the opportunity for making a personal connection with other committed artists seemed promising and fun... and it was... and I thank all of you for your generous, spirited company. I have always wrestled with my delicate/volatile artistic ego among fellow artists, which can foster a rather unnecessary isolation. Understandably, when self worth/validation is dangerously attached to worldly measurements of success - which for the hardworking, risk-taking, sensitive artist can be very threatening. So I assume each of us arises each and every day to drum up enormous enthusiasm for making artwork, without the structure and acceptance from the world. Ahhh, now that takes courage...courage to find sufficient self-acceptance to enter into a creative process that promises nothing but maybe an exhilarated moment of feeling alive or having realized an artistic whole. So, I wish to be open to the efforts of other artists, and to support one another as comrade in arms.

On another but sentimental note, upon leaving Maryland (where I visited my parents during the Holidays) when it is time to depart, I always feel uprooted. I think, too, that especially since this Art of Action initiative has been - at least for me - about honoring people who are deeply rooted and reverent in Vermont, I am reminded of my beloved homeland. Though I love Vermont, I will always be painting through an early sensory conditioning, learned a long time ago in the soft and mild rockless rolling hills of Maryland.

My mother and I are quite close, and ever since I can remember, parting has always been challenging for us. Driving down the long farm entrance from my childhood home in my truck, packed to the gills, I would crawl slowly away. Seeing her standing in front of the house waving goodbye has become at once a bonding but separating instant of our deep-rooted love. I would maintain a hawk's eye for her tiny waving silhouette until she disappeared out of sight. Currently she is with ill health, and during this most recent departure she was so sad and exclaimed, "Partir Est Mourir un Peu."

Maryland Revisited: Clutter Literacy and Waltzing Grande Dames

Driving south to Maryland on Christmas Eve to visit family, I was struck visually by a spectrum of landmarks that I have known and passed along Interstate 95 for at least forty years. They include an isolated Victorian in New Haven; the orange, steeply, pitched rooftops of a closed HOJO's in Connecticut; a grounded ferry in the meadow lands of New Jersey; several distinct, classic mid-Atlantic farmhouses that spread out along the Interstate in Delaware and Maryland; and the skewed horizon upon crossing the Millard E. Tydings Memorial Bridge with traffic careening over the Susquehanna River. The sense of mystery and fascination I carry for these distinctive places are memory posts for key aspects of my life's journey. Their significance lies in their having survived a radically changed landscape. Like a wizened elder, they bare witness and beckon me with great urgency to paint their near-forgotten history, preserve their dignity and place on the American landscape. These beacons of years gone by will soon vanish like all of our unmet dreams. But they still remain today and for me as captivating icons posing somehow the possibility for personal reconciliation and fulfillment. It is my strong intention to begin a series of paintings that respond to these old friends this early Spring when I make my annual March painting trip to the mid-Atlantic.

It is amazing how vastly different the culture of Vermont is compared to the suburban regions of the mid-Atlantic. The intensely populated outlying regions of Baltimore, for starters, are also mirrored by the large number of deer which graze along roadsides and create an obstacle course for motorists who frequently hit them. There is simply so much "stuff"...so much unsightly clutter that feels so incongruous with the surrounding nature that it hurts. In my life time I have witnessed vast areas of prime farmland transformed into cities of town houses and malls. In years past, I have rescued hutches, and raised paneled doors from doomed farmhouses in the wake of the perilous earth movers. I was forced to visit one of these mall complexes to seek out Ritz Camera, to complete a holiday task for my mother, and the transfiguration of the land was complete. Navigating one's way through these new town centers requires a kind of "clutter literacy," which does not acknowledge the otherwise significant assault to the senses. However, all this being said, I very much desire to paint these blinding worlds which swallow up the human race. I feel compelled to paint these indecipherable environments - not for novelty sake, but to help me live and see more consciously.

I did encounter pristine swaths of classical countryside which I have known intimately from my boyhood. What fantastic beauty...what creamy, rolling hillsides bleached blond by winter and crowned by tall tulip poplars. Small streams carve out high, ruddy clay banks through sumptuous meadows. Like a ballroom filled with waltzing Grand Dames, elegantly-limbed black walnut trees and lacy barked sycamores perfectly graced near the stream banks.

On Christmas Day, I walked through plowed fields in search of Native American projectile points which have revealed their secrets many times before. There was a thick ground cover as well as sharp sunlight, which made such a search too difficult. I did find a quartz flake.

In conclusion, it is interesting to wrestle with my nubile Vermont residency in the context of old-timers when my own cultural heritage relating to Maryland is so deeply rooted within me, as well as within generations of my flat-landed ancestors. It makes me sad to have uprooted my beloved soil; the original land, the primary educator of my senses and all that I love!