Hepatica and Moss

"Hepatica and Moss" 11"x 15" watercolor

This is watercolor done last month of Hepatica and Moss on the forest floor.  The original painting is now in a private collection.  I did the painting as the basis for a limited edition print which is available by contacting my studio.  Stinehour Wemyss Editions has made an incredibly faithful archival print from my original watercolor.  They are such a pleasure to work with because they are incredibly expert!  So far 10 have been printed.  The edition will be limited to 100.

Next begins work on a group of paintings of forest labor that will fill out this body of work.  At the same time I am beginning to plan how to gather and exhibit all the work I've done on this topic over the  past 18 years.  This is complicated and exciting and will take several years to accomplish.  I have every hope that I will be collaborating on this presentation with poet Verandah Porche who will add another dimension or two to the work! 

In the meantime there is a watercolor to complete and a visit next week to the Governor's Institute on the Arts to prepare for.  I will be giving both a workshop and an evening slide talk there.

This is an image of a watercolor I did this fall. It is of Larry and Mark Sherman on a job they had in Lincoln, Vermont a couple years ago. This scene was on a very cold day in March, as they watched the truck loading at the landing. Mount Abraham can be seen in the background.

This is Bill Torrey and his dog, with his forwarder in West Bolton. Bill has been a logger since he was a teenager. Hearing his story I believe he is a logger by vocation. It is something he loves and is committed to doing intelligently, in every sense of the word. He also loves to spend time hunting in the Adirondacks. I will be doing a painting of Bill in this spot, sharpening his saw.

This is John Bradley with a few of his forestry students at Hannaford Career Center in Middlebury, VT.

ART of ACTION is a hybrid private commission public art project that I am fortunate to be working on this year. The intention of the project is to inspire the people of Vermont with visual art that addresses issues related to our collective future. To fuel the conversation and brainstorming. To inspire a quality of life that is creatively sustainable. More aspects of the project keep revealing themselves to me as I get deeper into it, because I believe in the power of art to enrich, inspire, motivate and comfort us all.

My part of the project is about the forest that covers the vast majority of this state that I have lived in for 35 years. There's lots to say about why I resonate to the forest, but I'll save that for another time. I have done paintings in and about the forest, alongside other landscape painting, for a long time. Over the past 15 years I've gotten more interested in the grittier side of working with the forest: mills, loggers, equipment, and the work I'm doing for ART of ACTION grows out of that.

This morning Paul Cate called. He is a forester/logger in East Montpelier. I spent an afternoon with him a couple weeks ago to gather material for a painting of current best practices in harvesting trees. It was a sunny afternoon, with plenty of snow still on the ground, which was just what I'd hoped for. The visual qualities of snow are so dramatic, and simplify otherwise complex subjects, like the forest.

Paul had a lot to show me. He uses a 20 horsepower forwarder to get logs out of the woods. This alone is pretty neat to see. It's small, with big tires, and leaves a minimal footprint on the land, for logging equipment. It has an integrated grapple for loading logs onto the back, right in the woods. This saves dragging them over logging roads, where they can do a bit of damage to standing timber, as well as gouge out the roads.

Paul felled a tree with consummate skill, while I photographed the process. A few precise and beautiful cuts, carefully placed wedges, then a tap of his finger, and very slowly the tree started to lean, then fall, exactly where he'd intended it to. By that time the direct light that energizes my painting had left the forest, and we called it a day.

However, since this work is for the ART of ACTION project there was more to see. Paul is a thoughtful citizen of the world and is trying to arrange his life in accord with his convictions. An array of photo voltaic panels sits behind his father's house, and provides electricity for Paul and his wife's home, as well as his dad's. He also has a wood gassification boiler to heat both homes, and plans to heat their hot water with this too. I'm still thinking about these things, and whether they might become subjects for paintings, somehow. It's certainly inspiring. To see someone doing something like that makes it seem more possible for all of us.