The new exhibit “Dartmouth Influence” at BigTown Gallery—not 13 ways of looking at a blackbird (remember the Wallace Stevens poem?), but 13 lines for 11 artists...
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...