PUTNEY — At first blush, Putney and her neighboring towns look sleepy and sweet - quintessential Vermont, replete with the charming rusticity barns and farms afford.
But Putney is also home to the oldest continuing craft studio tour in North America. For 39 years, myriad artists and crafters have opened doors to visitors from the region and well beyond for the Thanksgiving weekend. It's a time to discover process and to meet some powerfully creative Vermonters.
But what are these artists doing in times around the tour, times when the studio can be a mess or in full-tilt production? How do they live with their art when we're not around?
What does it look like from within, surrounded by coveted pieces and works-in-progress?
Living with colored light
In Westminster, stained-glass artist Julia Brandis, a 10-year tour participant, lives in palpable tranquility. At her wood slab kitchen counter under two handsome hanging lamps Brandis created for the space, she explains, “Living with stained glass is about colored light. It creates a different atmosphere; the changing light is mood altering - it's natural and flowing.”
Having first felt the impulse of Tiffany, Brandis was soon inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, by Art Nouveau and by the Arts and Crafts movement: That's evident throughout, especially in lampshades where curves meet straight edges just as the brook outside her home meets the road.
“Living by a brook is interesting,” Brandis reflects, “because I see how land is constantly changing over time.”
“My work is nature-inspired: Some designs are very organic; some are much more linear,” she continues.
But even within the linear, trees and mountains appear and water images course through much of Brandis's work. In her living room, in lieu of a drape, an elegant panel covers a window. The verdant landscape beyond only enriches the various shapes and shades of green. One can imagine how stunning that picture must be in the winter against a stark white landscape.
“It's interesting to live with pieces - even if only for a brief time. I notice things - colored light that changes at different times of day with different angles of sunlight. Sunlight changes at different times of year, and I change with it.”
'Inviting art into our living'
In Brandis's neck of the woods, one also finds the bucolic home of Tom Goldschmid and his wife, Kathy Leo, a writer and mosaic artist. On the tour for the first time this year, Goldschmid succinctly offers his philosophy: “Instead of our living with art, we are inviting art into our living.”
Goldschmid came to the area in 1971, an early immigrant in the last half-century's back-to-the-land movement. Since then, “my whole working life has been some form of woodworking.”
From early days as a sawyer's assistant in Saxtons River through his work in architecture, then 30 years of timber framing and now in wood turning, he has been plying both form and function in found wood.
“Making these bowls is an extension of this place where we live. I'm taking the wood out of the groves here,” he says.
Sometimes he'll hold a piece of cord wood, scrutinize it and say, “Wait a minute: There's a bowl here.”
For his finish, Goldschmid uses a mix of mineral oil and the wax from bees nurtured on the property, which is resplendent with gorgeous and functional gardens, with old structures and new.
He asserts, “I don't make bowls to be observed: I make them to be used. My hope is to make something beautiful that you pick up every day and that is a part of your life.”
Clearly, that's what happens in his home, where hand-turned bowls are ubiquitous, taking liquid and yogurt, pesto and dark, wild blueberries.
What determines a bowl's fate?
“When I bring a bowl in and Kathy touches it, if it feels right she'll say, 'I just want to keep this bowl.'”
And that one's not for sale.
The earth we walk on
Fiona Morehouse lives up West Hill Road in an inviting down-the-slope home with a spiral staircase to the highest level and a yurt at the bottommost. It's woodsy and inventive, full of life, warmth, and art.
In her second year on the Putney tour, Morehouse talks about art and craft creating beauty while enhancing everyday living.
Both a painter and a potter, she says it's not easy to part with a painting while it is so with a piece of her ceramic work because “clay is utilitarian. Clay is the earth we walk on. It's a direct connection to human experience.”
“For me, art is like grace from the grit of life. You know you're always going to have dishes; you're always going to have laundry, so how can you make those experiences more artful? How can you bring grace into the mundane?”
Morehouse shows me a muffin tin - a dozen or so cups fused with robin's-egg-blue glaze. And she jokes that her kids can't stand the zucchini muffins she bakes in them (something to do with the elimination of sugar).
Morehouse asserts: “My life aesthetic is wabi-sabi, which, according to the Utne Reader, is everything that today's sleek, mass-produced, technology-saturated culture isn't. It's the singular beauty in something that may first look decrepit and ugly.”
Author Robyn Griggs Lawrence has written: “Through wabi-sabi, we learn to embrace liver spots, rust, and frayed edges, and the march of time they represent.”
The concept resonates through Morehouse's art and home, where the yurt boasts hanging panels of recycled window sashes and where one really can't distinguish between old and new.
Hidden designs and directions
Bob Burch lived on a commune up north for a while in his early Vermont days; he wended his way through pottery and into glass blowing - all self-taught.
Now, in his late-18th-century home, he showcases not only his own work from 40 years of glass blowing, but also that of his three children: a glassblower, a photographer, and a ceramicist.
An original member of the Putney craft circuit, Burch reflects on what work stays at home. It's the pieces he really likes or those he wants to continue to learn from and develop.
In the end, “my heart and my wife,” Nancy Gagnon, both determine what ends up on one of the many shelves of both functional glass and show pieces: perfume bottles, vases, lamps, garden sculptures, paperweights, hand-blown cups, and myriad one-of-a-kinds. A clear glass flask with a stopper holds Gagnon's homemade raspberry cordial.
“Living among my art,” Burch explains, “I let the glass talk to me: There are little hidden designs and directions in all the pieces.”
Glassblowing is serendipitous work, as Burch describes it: A piece takes a direction all its own as he shepherds its creation inspired by nature in its broadest realm: “People to trees to flowers. Things that are pleasing to the eye.”
Art works with the environment
In the garden of potter Ken Pick, one finds statuary and small scale tables painted in brilliant colors - bold and geometric.
Wall platters on Pick's barns offer an enhancing element to the garden, where they give “color all through the year,” he says. One can imagine how exquisite the platters will look on weathered barns surrounded by winter white.
“There's a thread through all my work that goes right back to my childhood,” Pick explains. “Right back into the sandbox, right back into the back woods I wandered. If I stop to considered the energy I put into my work, it goes all the way back to that.”
In much of what Pick keeps at home, the human figure emerges. Again, he says, “that energy goes back to my origin.”
“I keep pieces around that I'm still drawing from, that I need to look at to see how something works in the environment. If I'm still learning from it, I don't want to sell it yet. There are pieces all around that play that role for me.”
Brushstrokes from the breath
Like several of her colleagues, painter Deborah Lazar came to southern Vermont in the early '70s. She talks easily about her work: “All my brush strokes come from my breath.” A dancer, she says: “I'm uncomfortable walking a straight line.”
This motion shows in her work. Lazar paints from her core, she explains as she contracts and cantilevers her torso over her pelvis.
Surrounded in the living room by a range of canvasses, Lazar calls her style “impressionist realism.” She paints from life in situ inspired by direct observation.
In her living room, Lazar shows a wall of paintings, each of which has a special place in her head and heart. Pointing to the one of her mother's backyard, she whispers, “I'm going to cry.”
In July, she hit the Maine coast and returned with a collection of several new paintings, among them a canvas of E.B. White's cottage in Blue Hill. Recognized in several plein air competitions, her influencers are evident: Mingled with her own work, one eyes a Vermeer print and a John Singer Sargent. She names others, but the key inspiration is clear in the light and the movement of life she captures in her paintings.
The delight of the ordinary
In Westminster Station, multimedia artist Kim Grall works with gourds. Their range reflects her eclectic pursuits: painting, drawing, music, photography, printmaking, carving, fiber arts, and gardening. And her love of birds.
“Gourds are the perfect medium for embracing all of these,” Grall explains. “Throughout the world and its civilizations, gourds have emerged as food, utilitarian objects, musical instruments - everything from bowls to birdhouses.”
Raised on her property, these gourds live happily throughout Grall's home. Some are large, others dainty; some painted subtly, others more gaily; many decorated with beads and whimsy.
“A gourd bowl becomes more than just something to hold your yarn; it's smooth and warm to the touch, it's earthy and brings a burst of pleasure every time my eyes settle on it.
“A drum resting on a dresser invites someone to pick it up and play their hand against it. Little keepsake boxes provide a beautiful way to protect jewelry or keys or other small things you want to keep safe.”
Reflecting on the pleasure of living with art, Grall adds: “Why not have the things you use every day be something more? Something that brings delight through color or shape or texture.”