Spring Beauty and Bloodroot

Hooray for woodland wildflowers! I have long associations with these flowers which have brought so much joy to me over many years. This is a watercolor I finished last week, but started while perched on a very steep hillside in the Smoky Mountains last spring. I feel very lucky to do work that requires spending hours outdoors in close observation of beauty, weather and light. The work comes with the musty sweet smell of leaf litter and the feel of breeze on skin and sun on clothing. Also enormous stiffness from balancing against the slope and keeping the work stable on my knees for some hours! Finishing this painting made me want to do some companion watercolors of more spring wildflowers. Today while out walking on the road I spotted Hepatica and Wake Robin growing above the ditches. Hoping to see lots more this weekend.

I will be having an Open Studio here in Lincoln VT if you want to come see this painting and others in person for yourself. It's part of Open Studio Weekend, May 28 and 29 from 10AM to 5PM both days. There will be yellow signs along the roads to direct you both to my place in Lincoln and to potter Judith Bryant's studio also in Lincoln. I am looking forward to having visitors!

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.

Here is Paul Cate working in the woods with his forwarder. He jokes that other loggers ask him when this machine is going to "grow up".

Things Paul has said in conversation continue to resonate with me. He is committed to careful quality work in harvesting. As he and other foresters have said to me, it's not about the trees we cut, it's about the ones we leave standing.

As I continue to brew the painting ideas to envisage the future of our forests the idea of sustainability keeps pushing resource extraction out of the picture. It's a paradigm shift that's been underway in the daily lives of people like Paul for quite a while.

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.