Walking into BigTown Gallery, Vergennes, don’t trip on the shoes; they are all over the floor. The high narrow space looks like a giant’s closet, albeit a very tall giant with normal-size feet, who loves shoes, but not just any shoe—very colorful ones covered in meticulous patterns, or big splotches of color, or swirly psychedelic strokes. A neat giant, too, the shoes and boots being laid out in regular rows, in pairs, in a quiet, orderly conversation, a conversation I want to be part of. What are these giant’s shoes saying to one another, to me, to the giant?
Walking through Big Town Gallery in Vergennes, I find my eyes continually being drawn to the floor, fascinated by the display of dozens of paired designer shoes, over-painted by Rick Skogsberg. These are objects of beauty and delight, defined by a strong sense of color, meticulous patterning, and an intricate play of subtle variations within each couple...
I said I would write about color.
Today?
As Vermont turns white again, snow falling, shades of gray, splashes of green.
A hint of yellow on the chickadee’s flank, otherwise, all pert business,
all cheerful busy-body flirtation.
But spring-like. Certainly. As the days get longer.
As owls mate deep in the woods, their yellow eyes.
When I was about six, I read a story about a little girl who meets bears behind doors, creatures who live in the shadows, whom no one sees but children. Since then, I have loved shadows—under tables, on snow, in a puppet’s theater. In a church. Behind a stone wall. Among the tallest zinnia plants...
Last week, we slowly strolled through two brilliant exhibits at The Met in New York: Michelangelo and David Hockney. We were amused that they were exhibited in adjoining galleries, the soft red chalk drawings of stately Renaissance buildings and powerfully muscular bodies, and the bright blue-green paintings of swimming pools and country lanes. They couldn’t be more different, although each artist is dedicated to representing the human figure and architectural spaces of his time and place...
The current exhibition at BigTown Gallery in Vergennes is inspired by a display at the Centre Pompidou in Paris of a reconstruction of the surrealist André Breton’s studio which featured a dense hanging of works by masters of modern art, tribal masks, found objects, and popular culture decorative items–all of which could provoke, for Breton, the ideal moment of surreality in which the viewer’s unconscious responses transformed normal experience into a heightened sensation of the totality of being...
Peter Moriarty celebrated his 65th birthday in Rochester the other night with a group of friends. Beaming with good cheer and gratitude, Peter counted his blessings: an 89-year-old mom holding her own in spite of recent heart-related woes; two daughters, Mirah and Ella, dancer and lawyer; good health; his bicycle; and most importantly—what makes his eyes light up—the prospect of finishing a beloved project begun more than thirty years ago—the publication by David Godine of a book of his photographs of 18th and 19th-century greenhouses from around the world...
Walking into BTG Vergennes on Saturday evening for the opening of the new exhibition “Bridge Wharf Raft,” I felt right at home—reminders of the sea and being on the sea were fastened to Anni’s high white walls all around me—rough-hewn planks of wood weathered to a honey-brown patina and fitted together into a raft; a bunch of oars nesting on wooden supports, with a hoop angling away from them into space; and thickly oiled black and white surfaces reminiscent of tar, seagulls, seaweed, and clouds. All that was missing was a whiff of salt air...
I notice right away, anyone would, when I walk into the Projects Gallery’s new show “See the Woods for the Trees” that artist Joan Kahn likes geometric shapes. She says that herself, and recounts a comment her young son made years ago when asked what his mother does. “She paints boxes,” he said, “and if that makes her happy, it’s all right with me.” “True,” Kahn says today, “I love to paint boxes...”
Well, Hugh Townley intervened, and Erik Baier intervened, much to my surprise and great pleasure. What a treat—to immerse myself in works of art by two wonderful artists and to receive a visit by Erik himself who stopped by to photograph his current show of stately photographs...
I’ve been wracking my brain. What do these have in common: a troupe of puppeteers and their paper maché, larger-than-life puppets—uproarious, irreverent, revolutionary—and a writer’s narration of physicists’ hunt for one of the tiniest particles in existence through a telescope buried at the south pole?
Why would Erik Baier load a backpack with 60 pounds of camera equipment and set off on a muddy track, uphill, in 90-degree weather, not knowing the way, whom he’d meet, and, heavens, whether the folks would be friendly?
My good friend from many years ago, Judy Busch, a wonder in the kitchen, a wonder in all places and all ways, read herself to sleep at night with cookbooks, the one thing she did that I didn’t quite get, although my wife Margi picked up the habit very quickly, soon lugging heavy tomes to bed herself. But I’m finally catching on many years later because of Paula Marcoux’s Cooking with Fire...
When Didi and Major Jackson read their poems on Sunday in the Gallery (5:30—don’t miss it!), I wonder if they will include the pair of love poems published in Aquifer: Florida Review Online in April: “The View From Up Here” (by Major) and “On Hawk Mountain, Vermont” (by Didi). I hope so, because I love them...
Major Jackson wouldn’t know me from any other earnest poet-in-training, but I “studied” with him in a two-hour class he led at Bookstock two years ago in which he introduced the one-sentence poem...
What to expect from Russell Leong’s reading, the third installment in this summer’s Joan Hutton Landis Reading Series, this coming Sunday, July 9? Surprises, that’s for sure...
Tucked away in BigTown Gallery’s Projects Gallery—that mysterious, enchanted space where artists arrive every few weeks to install their current work—is a heart...
Annie Kim’s reading on June 25 is, one, a reading of poetry that explores Annie’s childhood in Korea and how that intersects with her later life in America, and, two, (drum roll) her first visit to Vermont....
The title of Robin MacArthur’s Half Wild, a collection of short stories set along a short stretch of Vt. Rt. l00, invokes an important passage by Thoreau—“in Wildness is the preservation of the World”—and raises a question before I’ve read a page...
I just finished Rosamond Purcell’s book Owls Head, a recounting of and meditation on purveyor of trash William Buckminster...
I used to think, before Townley, that relief sculpture meant serene goddesses in rippling robes standing at attention on a marble façade—ancient creations, emanating from some primal genius, enigmatic, portentous, mythical...
Walking into BigTown Gallery, Vergennes, is like walking into a treasure chest where magical things have been stored—things you forgot you had and now lovingly remember, feast on, turn over in your mind and heart...