I’m happy to announce the 5 Fellows who have been selected for a 2015 Windy Mowing Residency. Each Fellow will spend 2 weeks in Halifax, Vermont creating work in their respective field. This marks the 6th year of the program and I’m excited to see it grow and flourish.

Thomas Dahlberg was born in Morehead, Kentucky in 1986. He studied visual art and Portuguese as an undergrad at Brown University. Upon graduation, Dahlberg received the Belsky-Moranis Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts, and a Fulbright Fellowship to teach English in Piraí, Brazil. His work has been exhibited in the Boston-based galleries The Hallway and Voltage Café, as well as in the Betty Foy Sanders Center for Art and Theatre at Georgia Southern University. Last summer he received a full fellowship for an artist residency at the Vermont Studio Center.  Recently, Dahlberg earned his MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art. This summer he will be attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

“I’ve come to realize that what catches my eye isn’t an actual thing, but the act of perception. It’s a reflex that effortlessly engages my entire body. My body orients my vision in space. And from the interplay between space, sight and body I paint.”

[See image gallery at www.davidbrewsterfineart.com]
Phaan Howng, MFA Mount Royal School of Interdisciplinary Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art 2015, BFA Boston University, 2004, Vermont Studio Center Residency in 2005, Tyler School of Art Intensive Summer Painting Program in 2012.

“My work investigates post-apocalyptic conditions through a vivid imagining of destructive geological events.”

[See image gallery at www.davidbrewsterfineart.com]
Amy Marisa Yee received her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art’s Rinehart School of Sculpture in 2015.  She holds a BA in Studio Art from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

[See image gallery at www.davidbrewsterfineart.com]

Rebekah Higgins, BFA, Pratt Institute 1992.  I have worked professionally as a graphic designer and illustrator. I currently balance two demanding vocations: the deepening and expansion of my own creative practices while being a full-time Professor of Art and Design at Community College of Philadelphia, teaching and developing: drawing, foundation design and graphic design courses.

“I am a mixed-media visual artist and a writer. I work without a stylistic signature bringing whatever articulation can be brought to those dreamy spaces, the things humans only half remember and can’t quite express.”

[See image gallery at www.davidbrewsterfineart.com]

Cortright Devereux, has a certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and a bachelor degree in religion from the Colorado College.

“I make paintings and drawings that consider line, texture, active and passive areas and pay attention to the beginning and ending of forms.”

[See image gallery at www.davidbrewsterfineart.com]

I was an ecstatic eleven year-old boy who had found my Spanish Main. On my knees I started clawing into a sloping embankment packed with a century-old dump. I dug through a layered earthen lasagna representative of Maryland’s farming heritage. Vigorously but delicately, I sifted cascading decades of debris for glass bottles. The spicy fragrance of ripped apart sassafras roots and loamy topsoil made my nostrils flare in anticipation of buried treasure.

Natural gullies in wooded ravines at the edge of open farmland often became dumping grounds for 19th century farmers. The barely-exposed rim of blue enamel buckets would catch my 20th century eye and like the broken mast of a sunken ship, lead me to these forgotten hidden troves. White milk glass discs spilled out from under the foliage like coins. Once used to seal canning mason jars, they long survived their rotted outer tin caps. Using a blunted wooden stick I poked and pulled dirt away from massive roots and large, strange iron implements. Upon spying a glass neck, I would more carefully excavate the vessel as not to break it. Soon, small medicine bottles embossed with Morgan Millard Druggists and cobalt blue poison were released from the clutches of roots and tumbled into my hands. As did larger ones like Lydia Pinkham Hair Tonic, aqua colored Castor oil , triangular amber ink wells,  charcoal battery canes. I littered the glass objects on top of the crest of the excavation site. Sun dried, the exhumed capsules gleamed a strange dull and ghostly light. Salamanders and rusty bed springs sprung from the loosening soil as my digging frenzy deepened. Lost in a timeless trance, I slipped into the depths of a buried past and tried to understand the bygone world of hand blown glass, stoneware and cast iron.

Fifteen years later, living in West Philadelphia, I was given permission to excavate a privy site behind an Italianate Victorian town house built just after the Civil War. Only a circle of sunken bricks seemed vaguely suggestive of this presupposed 19th century outdoor toilet. I spent two full days digging furiously into the depths of this brick-lined chamber. Deeper and deeper I shoveled out buckets of cinders with out a trace of artifacts. Finally, this cylindrical time capsule, corked mostly by ash, revealed like a crime scene an alarming array of porcelain doll limbs, even a head with a blue painted bonnet and a Lady’s tortoise shell hair comb. At the depth of 24 feet, the very bottom, I discovered some very distinctive bottles dating from the mid 1860’s whose lead and magnesium composites made them sparkle with a flaky colored opalescence. Underground, chemical and mineral reactions caused the no-so-very-old glass to look more exotic. I felt as though I had stumbled upon ancient Egyptian relics from King Tut’s tomb.
Captivated by the ground below my feet, it is no wonder I have always been drawn to urban scavengers pushing shopping carts through the city streets collecting copper metal and automotive parts. The age-old phenomenon, whereby humans are hunters and gatherers, instinctively seeking out nuggets of hope; to inform, recycle and to sustain their livelihood, is at the essential core of our existence. Perhaps my 1993 drawing of an itinerant urban dweller posed next to his prized hot water tank is reminiscent of this timeless endeavor, and relates to the recently found 200-year-old time capsule in Baltimore hidden within the cornerstone of the first monument erected for President Washington. Whether a fortune in the junk pile, an archaeological find of great significance, or a harvest of potatoes, humans are driven to dig out the living past to make their own history more real and give sustenance to life.

A thousand buildings burned in February of 1904 when a great fire devastated the heart of Baltimore’s financial district. Pictorially this historic conflagration provoked my imagination in a major way and inspired me to depict several epic views of the fire in various stages of its spectacular destruction.
In 2010, The W.P. Carey Foundation commissioned me to create a suite of large oil paintings based on historic Baltimore during the life and times of James Carey (1751-1834) of Loudon, the great early Baltimore businessman for whom Johns Hopkins Carey Business School is named. Even though the 1904 fire did not ravage the city until 70 years later it provided a startling re awakening that most buildings from18th and 19th century were lost for ever. I was largely influenced by JMW Turner’s Burning of the Houses of Parliament which also accidentally caught fire in 1834. I share the British masters enthusiasm for voluminous plumes of smoke , volatile explosions of weather , and a devilish attempt at creating order out of chaos.

Buffered by the Jones Falls, the old power plant in Baltimore’s inner harbor survived the fire. It is featured, the morning after, as a lavender silhouette against a burnt pink sky in my painting depicting the view southeast from the Continental Trust Building. I was also was intrigued by the dramatic salvage efforts made to remove bank safes from the charred remains of major financial institutions. Heavy cast iron safes, filled with millions of dollars and safety deposits were tumbled down dozens of stories, cratering into cellar holes where excavators designed elaborate pulley systems pulled by teams of mules to salvage these valuable coffers. Curious looking men dressed in white heavy canvas suits called “white wingers ” were seen amidst the debris recoiling ruined fire hose. They appeared to me like ghosts rising from the ashes trying to reclaim their beloved city. Like many of us fascinated by the Great Fire of 1904 I found myself in my dreams exploring the exquisite mansard shell of the smouldering B & O Building and lingering at night by steam pump engines that ushered in the mystical dawn of Baltimore’s new age.

Excitingly, I once again have the opportunity to paint dynamic subjects related to Maryland, this time engaging the diverse issues facing Maryland today. Commissioned by the Maryland Historical Society, I will interpret Maryland’s ‘Controversial’ Social History scheduled to open in 2017. My newly created paintings will be juxtaposed with selected artifacts from the museums collection in order to serve as a teaching exhibition and reanimation of the living past. The contemporary examinations will make Maryland’s distinctive history relevant and demonstrate how the continuity of artistic form provides a compelling visual literacy . I strongly believe that the artistic interpretation of challenging topic narratives such as immigration, same sex marriage , poverty, plight of black Marylander and the Baltimore underground has the capacity to provide universal appeal and most importantly give a sense of human dignity in an epoch of such extraordinary diversity.

[See image gallery at www.davidbrewsterfineart.com]

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.

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 (30×40 ) charcoal/pastel drawings, 2 (31×31) 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.

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! 😛

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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!”