When the Tesluk family moved into a New Canaan, Connecticut, landmark, they became part of the town’s history, even as they started creating their own.
landscape
Yankee
Expressionist Island
The gentle Cranberry Isles scattered off the shores of rugged Mount Desert Island have provided shelter and subject matter to some of the best artists in modern Maine art history – William Kienbusch, John Heliker, Robert LaHotan, Dorothy Eisner, Emily Nelligan, Ashley Bryan, Gretna Campbell, and Campbell’s son Henry Finkelstein. Like most of the artists […]
Meg Brown Payson is a Maine painter whose work tends to be seen more often in Massachusetts than in Maine. Currently, it’s in Chester, Connecticut, subject of a solo exhibition at Eo Art Lab entitled Hydrostatic Pressure (through September 26). The title, which in fluid mechanics is “the pressure at a point in a fluid […]
Yankee
Thermoplastic Downeast
The Tides Institute and Museum of Art in Eastport, Maine, has been having a 1970s summer. The exhibition that just closed, The ’70s: Art & Place at Passamaquoddy Bay, Maine, featured artists active in the area in the 1970s. Now, (through September 19) the Tides Institute is featuring a solo exhibition by Richard Van Buren, […]
Magazine
The Iceland Diaries, Part Seven
Iceland, when I was there, had no trees. None. A naked land. I was told that the reason there were no trees was because of the sheep, which ranged free all over the country at that time, and because of the wind, which I knew stunted the growth of trees on places such as Cape […]
Read the Original House for Sale article It all started with a crooked-looking bay window in 1999. More than a decade on, that’s how Chris Allen remembers it. The window, made out of two old cabinet doors, was just a small part of a grand old house in downtown Groton, Massachusetts, that Chris passed each […]
Yankee
Blowing Up Maine
A decade ago, Scottish painter Peter Davies painted two famous paintings “The Hot One Hundred” and “The Hip One Hundred.” Both paintings are simply colorful lists of important artists. Alex Katz made both paintings. He was No. 90 on “The Hot One Hundred,” but he was No. 4 on “The Hip One Hundred.” Since the […]
Yankee
Bright , Shiny and Kinetic
George Sherwood brings a somewhat unusual background to the creation of art. The Ipswich, Massachusetts, resident earned a BFA at the Hartford Art School back in 1976 and spent time as a street performer in Burlington, Vermont, before enrolling at the University of Vermont to a study for a degree in engineering (B.S. 1984). He […]
Magazine
Iceland Diaries, Part Two
On June 15, 2010, at 6 a.m., our Boeing 757 touched down on a long runway and taxied toward what I could see was an elegant new airport. Same place, different building. I had, of course, expected the airport to be modern and updated. And I expected the rocks would still be there but they […]
Connecticut
The Return of Rackstraw Downes
The Maine art community, myself included, never really appreciated painter Rackstraw Downes when he was a seasonal resident of the state. Though he had a summer home in rural Morrill from the 1960s until fairly recently, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Rackstraw Downes show in Maine. Now that Downes, a New York City […]
Magazine
The Iceland Diaries, Part One
For the next few blogs, I’ll be writing about Iceland, which is, to me, the most fascinating country on earth. I hope you will agree. In June of 1969, when I was twenty years old, I traveled to Iceland and found work on a farm called Frodastadir (Froe-tha-stah-theer) herding sheep on horseback, milking cows, shoveling […]
If necessity is the mother of invention, what gives birth to reinvention? Is it dire necessity? A quest for perfection? Or a deeply personal conviction? Whatever the case, scrapping something back to its beginnings and re-creating it is a monumental task. Don’t ask me how, at the age of 43, Wallace Nutting had the energy […]