Mr. Alphonse Hudon, / wearing a blue parka and dress hat, / leans on his cane on Pawtucket Street, / checking the freshly tarred walk / and grove of short pines / along the Northern Canal. / “Looks good, doesn’t it?” I ask. / And he says, “I liked it better the way it was,” […]
Every year at this time, I drive down into the Connecticut River Valley, down through Northfield and Sunderland and Hadley, to buy my winter supply of onions and potatoes, plus winter squash and apples, and a few other things that will keep in my root cellar. This way, I don’t have to think about buying […]
Joel Babb possesses that preternatural ability to paint complex visual realities both with high fidelity and poetic expression. Hyperrealism is an aesthetic not always valued on the contemporary art scene these days but one he shares with a handful of other fine painters of Maine, among them Richard Estes, Linden Frederick, and Alan Magee. In […]
Conceptual artist Jim Denevan turns the classic dictum ars longa, vita brevis (art is long, life is short) on its head. His elegant, large-scale sand drawings on vacant beaches last only as long the incoming tide. Then they are swept away forever. Denevan, is a chef, surfer, and sand artist from Santa Cruz, CA. I […]
It was the summer of 1953. Ernest F. Fetske, a prominent naval architect from New York, and his wife, Bettina, were taking a load of bricks in their boat out to their vacation home on five-acre Brockway Island in Essex, Connecticut. They’d been spending weekends there since purchasing it in the early 1940s. Folks around […]
It’s the church steeple that causes Jeff Folger, a.k.a. Jeff “Foliage,” Yankee‘s compulsive foliage blogger, to spin his red Silverado pickup truck around the town green of Brooklyn, Connecticut. The steeple is an unusual one, with a rectangular base giving way to a mansard-roof cupola covered in copper sheathing. And more to our purpose, it […]
There’s a reason this stretch of highway–some 200 miles from Massachusetts to Lake Memphremagog–has been called the best foliage drive in VT, and even the most scenic in all of New England.
I love many things about this area, but one of my strongest pulls is from the legacy of art that underlies this and our surrounding towns. Beautiful landscape paintings seem like the very earth beneath our feet here, or at least this earth is the sustenance out of which these paintings have grown. Many artists […]
I guess I must have missed Alan Gussow. Though he painted on Monhegan Island from 1949 until his death in 1997 and I have written about art in Maine since 1978, I’ve never seen a major Gussow show. Apparently, there was a ten-year retrospective at the Portland Museum of Art back in 1970, the year […]
Just back from some R&R on my favorite island, Nantucket. I’ve been going since I was a kid. The first time, I think, my mom took me, when I was about 6. My older brother was in North Dakota for the summer, living with family friends who own a ranch. I think Mom was trying […]
In this classic Yankee profile, the queen of cooking ponders her next move.
Anchored in the east by Conway Village and to the west by Lincoln, the Kancamagus Highway is driven by more than 750,000 vehicles every year and is some of the loveliest and wildest land in the White Mountain National Forest.
