Kinetic energy, ant empires, giant fossils and water fun: The Montshire Museum engages minds of all ages

In another life I must have been a scientist because, despite the fact that I'm an art writer, I am and always have been fascinated with a broad swath of the sciences, from quantum physics, astronomy and entomology to superstring theory, archaeology and botany. Fortunately, there's a nearby haven for people like me who never quite made it to MIT but who always keep a copy of Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" on hand for those frequent "must-know" moments.

The Montshire Museum houses a dynamic collection of engaging, interactive and multi-themed natural and physical sciences displays, as well as special traveling exhibits that are accessible and fascinating to every member of the family, whether it's the Wind Wall, the Frog Calls, the Heat Camera or the water activities outside.

Though my kids think I take them there out of the generosity of my motherly heart, the truth is I look forward to every semi-monthly or so trip we make just as much as they do. And when they head off to explore the theater of Fireflies, the Resonant Pendulum or the Bikevator, they know they can usually find me at one of two places: the Leafcutter Ants exhibit or the Honey Bees' hive.

At one end of what is a veritable kingdom of ant civilization — with Plexiglas boxes housing civic locales such as a dump and a graveyard, all linked together like a futuristic New England connected farm — an articulated magnifying lens is suspended over a factory teeming with activity. We get extreme close-ups of leaves being industriously cut and carried by the mediae ants, who transport them through a clear tube to the fungus garden, supervised by the smallest workers, called minims.

I have yet to spot the reclusive queen, which could be a good thing as she apparently has relatives in South America the size of hamsters. When it comes to serving her people, this monarch puts all others to shame. The story goes that she mated once 12 years ago and saved the sperm, fertilizing her own eggs and mothering the entire colony single-tarsally ever since. She is one feisty formicida and I, for one, find her and the family business riveting.

Leafcutter ant society is remarkable, particularly in terms of self-sufficiency. They are apparently the only animals beside humans that grow their own food, so we eco-glutton bi-peds have a lot to learn from these tireless farmers. They also outweigh us: As much as 20 percent of the total weight of all land animals worldwide is comprised of ants. Ergo, whenever I see one on the floor, I don't bother squishing it; there's no point, they'll be in charge eventually anyway.

The honey bee community is equally mesmerizing, with drones and workers going about their business in a hive that's completely visible and connected to the outdoors, allowing us to watch them taking off and coming in for a landing, laden with pollen.

Whether low-tech or state-of-the-art, live specimens or taxidermy, whimsical or scholarly, each display at the Montshire Museum is creative, captivating and compelling for every age. On the second level, near vitrines containing birds, their nests and delicate eggs, there are exquisite cases of preserved dragonflies, butterflies, moths and beetles, and nearby a massive moose, whose fur you can touch, watches over the gallery.

On the ground floor, there are bubble activities, aquariums, inventive puzzles and a zoetrope, as well as an under-5s play area where a faux black bear hibernates a the end of a darkened tunnel through which little ones can crawl if they dare.

A more recent acquisition is the Time Machine, a monitor with a manual dial that allows viewers to speed up or slow down seamlessly looped film footage of anything from milk splashing out of a dropped glass to ferns sprouting up from a carpet of pine needles to a hummingbird nipping nectar from a blossom. Bolts of lightning or the seasonal burst of a bunchberry flower, which is known to open and catapult its pollen in less than a millisecond, can be examined at a freeze-frame pace and, likewise, slow-moving clouds and even baking cinnamon rolls can be sped up to dramatic effect.

The Montshire's more traditional attractions are no less thrilling, including the impossibly huge (taller than my 9-year-old) 135 million-year-old femur of an apatosaurus, which is displayed next to a similarly sobering 18-foot skin of an anaconda snake.

Another major draw is the Science Park just behind the Montshire, an outdoor museum in and of itself, with hands-on — and, during warm weather — bodies-in exhibits that use natural elements to teach kids about the movement of air, sound and water.

The Stone Xylophone is a row of giant stone beams with a cork mallet and the rich, resonant sound it produces gets some kids so involved, they end up with a cardio workout as well.

Nearby, the Matisse Musical Fence, built by none other than Paul Matisse, the grandson of renowned painter Henri Matisse, transforms 59 vertical aluminum pipes into a huge versatile instrument that inspires imagination as well as teamwork.

Farther down a winding path through a beautifully landscaped sloping garden, H20 becomes the focus, with the Water Rill, a 250-foot course that allows kids to make dams, float balls and check out water patterns. The Mist Fountain creates an umbrella of soft spray that produces rainbows when the light is right and just beyond that, at the base of a tiered series of wading pools, are the popular water bells that kids can adjust into different shapes and explore from within.

This place is a 362-days-a-year goldmine and in the summer months, when kids are thirsty for intellectual and social stimulation, the Science Park's outdoor activities, picnic tables and six hiking trails make it an especially exhilarating all-day outing.

I've brought friends visiting with their kids from culturally fertile places such as D.C., S.F. and Germany, and they all comment that they don't have anything like this where they live, so I count my lucky stars — particularly during the museum's terrific constellation lectures — that we have this in our own back yard.

The museum regularly offers talks and films on various subjects, along with camps and classes for kids, such as the Inventors' Workshop, Aquatic Investigations and Exploring Nature Through Art. There are adult courses, too, including one on native wildflowers starting tonight and going through the weekend.

The Montshire Museum, whose name come from the last syllables of both the states it serves, is a treasure trove of wonderment. Whether you're a wannabe physicist or just a parent looking for an affordable family adventure, plan a visit — and don't forget the swimsuits.

Online: www.montshire.org
Annie: annieguyoncommunications.com

Speaking out for art education's sake: Community goes to the mat and wins

"Art is the Queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world."

— Leonardo da Vinci

It started out looking like any other school board meeting. Administrators, board members, a local reporter and a few parents were settling into chairs in a small classroom at the Bellows Falls Middle School on a quiet January weeknight. But on this particular evening, things started seeming out of the ordinary fairly quickly. The room began filling with more parents and community members than usual, excited chatter grew, administrators looked solemn and a couple of board members seemed tense.

The school janitor started bringing in more chairs and tables were nudged to make space for the growing crowd, with earnest tête-à-têtes, broad smiles and a lot of surprised expressions emerging around the room. Suddenly, someone announced that we were moving to the auditorium, which fueled the commotion further.

Me? I was positively giddy.

Word had traveled through the community earlier in the week that the School Board was poised to make cuts to art, music and physical education at the school that night, so a few of us had done our best to alert fellow parents, neighbors and art advocates with the hopes that a strong presence at the meeting might dissuade the School Board from making proposed reductions.

Though we knew these are hard times and budgets are thin, this is a community that prides itself on a thriving art scene, having built a widespread reputation as an eminent, vibrant epicenter of fine arts, music, literature and theater with wonderful venues, events and festivals that draw patrons from near and far.

Cutting art programs here would be like reducing computer classes in Silicon Valley or Little League in Boston. Art is part of the bedrock of this community, yet here we were facing the possibility of our own children having this crucial element of their education reduced.

I'd hoped for 20 attendees or so, 30 tops, but as people kept streaming down the aisles and into seats it became clear that this was no little flurry of artsy parental protest. The chair called the meeting to order and, as the board discussed other business on the agenda, I went to the back of the room and did a head count: A full 162 people were in attendance. Even better, a remarkable 60 of them had signed up to speak.

When our item came up on the agenda, speakers were asked to stand, state their name and say their piece. Parents, grandparents, teachers, former teachers, staff members, community members and business owners spoke with passion, eloquence and occasionally palpable disdain for the very notion of eroding the schools' art programs in a culturally rich community such as ours. Some told stories of students whose difficult home lives were assuaged by their immersion into art projects at school, while others insisted that if it weren't for music their child would never have discovered a remarkable talent.

At one point I recited a list of factoids that I thought might resonate with board members concerned about student performance in standardized testing. One report, from the College Entrance Examination Board, found that "students who studied art scored significantly higher than the national average on SATs" and that "visual arts education greatly contributes to reading persistence and organization as well as reasoning skills required for success in math and science."

The U.S. Dept. of Education also published "Schools, Communities and the Arts: A Research Compendium," which shows, according to more than 3,000 studies, "music education specifically fosters stronger spatial reasoning necessary for solving mathematical problems, creative scientific processes and developing general planning skills."

And, according to "Effects of Physical Education and Activity Levels on Academic Achievement in Children," published by the American College of Sports Medicine, "Numerous studies have shown positive relationships between academic achievement and both physical activity and sports participation." Though it might be assumed physical education simply means sports, it also includes creative movement and allows kids to explore dance in a way they might never be able to otherwise.

Far more powerful than any adults' stories or stats, however, were the students themselves. It was obvious that most had never spoken in front of such a large group, much less held a big microphone, but one by one, and sometimes in groups, they stood and spoke. One trio of girls read a poem they'd written based on John Lennon's "Imagine," about what their lives would be like with no art programs. Then a quiet boy explained that his coach had become an important mentor to him and that he couldn't make it through school without having gym class to look forward to.

Perhaps the most moving moment was when a shy, pale girl gingerly took the mic, her spiky pink hair falling into teary, heavily mascaraed eyes and choked that if it wasn't for band she wouldn't want to come to school at all and that music was her motivation for doing everything else.

In the end, enough members of the board heeded the heartfelt accounts of student engagement and success being intrinsically connected to art programs, and figured out how to avoid making cuts to art and music, though the physical education program was unfortunately reduced. It meant that the school's principal, Cheryl McDaniel-Thomas, was going to have to do some mighty creative budget management, but she was ready for the challenge and has been amazing us with her innovative vision and resourcefulness ever since.

This pragmatic ingenuity and commitment to creativity permeates the entire district staff and was on beautiful display recently when the Saxtons River Elementary School put on its spring concert. With the direction of music teacher Alissa Daigneault, beautiful sets painted by students with the guidance of art teacher Colleen Grout and inventive choreography by gym teacher Mary Lou Smith — who was named the 2007 Vermont Elementary Physical Education Teacher of the Year — the kids seemed to take everything that was said to the School Board that night in January and put it into colorful, expressive motion.

They played rousing tunes on recorder, performed complex dances, put on a death-defying jump rope display and sang delightful songs, including one that put the name of every state to the tune of "Turkey In the Straw." How's that for augmenting academics through art?

When I asked Smith her opinion on the value of the arts, she was enthusiastic and direct. "The arts give students the opportunity to be creative - a fast disappearing skill in this age of reliance on test scores. Often I will give students a piece of equipment and say 'Show me what you can do with this' and they come up with things I never would have thought of. When students are given the opportunity to think and explore on their own they come up with the most amazing ideas."

Art instructor extraordinaire Colleen Grout believes her curriculum manual, based on the National Standards for Arts Education, says it all. "Arts education benefits the student because it cultivates the whole child, gradually building many kinds of literacy while developing intuition, reasoning, imagination and dexterity into unique forms of expression and communication. An education in the arts benefits society because students of the arts gain powerful tools for understanding human experiences, past and present. They learn to respect the often very different ways others have of thinking, working and expressing themselves. They learn to make decisions in situations where there are no standard answers. By studying the arts, students stimulate their natural creativity and learn to develop it to meet the needs of a complex and competitive society. And, as study and competence in the arts reinforce one other, the joy of learning becomes real, tangible and powerful."

Amen.

To support arts education in Vermont, contact the Vermont Alliance For Arts Education at www.vaae.org.

Annie: annieguyoncommunications.com

Brave new work: Art that tweaks perception and purpose

On the topic of defining modern art, American conceptualist Joseph Kosuth had much to say in his 1969 essay, "Art After Philosophy," which remains eminently relevant.

"Artists question the nature of art by presenting new propositions as to art's nature. And to do this one cannot concern oneself with the handed-down "language" of traditional art, as this activity is based on the assumption that there is only one way of framing art propositions. But the very stuff of art is indeed greatly related to "creating" new propositions."

Ever the steady source of new propositions, the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center recently opened "In the Zone II," a defiant, elegant declaration of newness that had me fondly recalling my first brush with the eternal novelty of conceptual art.

The ink still smudgeable on my art history diploma, it was my first day of work at one of San Francisco's cream-of-the-crop contemporary art galleries and the director was earnestly showing me how to pack a sculpture in bubble wrap to prepare for its shipment to the collector who'd bought it. Each of the 100 elements needed padding, which was daunting enough but my jaw really dropped when he added, "Don't worry if any break, the artist can make more — it's toast."

That's right — toast, which is what I knew I'd be if I let the guffaw rising up my esophagus escape in a burst of uncouth unprofessionalism. I didn't know which was more absurd, that an avid art patron had laid down 10 singed slices of Wonder bread presented on plywood shelving or that I was being paid (handsomely, I might add) to pack them like Faberge eggs.

Goes without saying that in my newbie nervousness I managed to break about an entire loaf's worth during the process, but my boss serenely suggested I call the artist for "replacement toast." More toast forthcoming, I chuckled at my preposterous "if they could see me now" moment, wincing at what my art history professors, much less my parents, would say. I eventually did tell Mum about it, which only elicited a sardonic inquiry as to why I hadn't brought along a pot of tea and a jar of marmalade.

Perhaps it was the intoxicating cloud of enriched flour fragrance, but I started musing on the artist's decision to use such an iconic, not to mention perishable, medium and by the time she'd delivered the fresh batch of toast I'd decided she was making a fairly pithy point about consumerism, our collective perception of value and the omnipresence, if not omnipotence, of products in our society.

I spent the next two years discussing, curating, displaying and crating every breed, creed and species of creative conceptual expression, from handmade cement blobs and alder wood frying in a pan to huge collages made of car floor mats that'd been stapled to the gallery wall. Heady stuff.

Having traveled through epochs of artistic archetypes in the context of academia — including Dadaism, minimalism, abstraction, pop, op, performance, process, graffiti and video art — I discovered that working directly with conceptual art on a daily basis gave me an understanding of it that I could have never fully attained in the lecture hall.

And yet, one of the most compelling qualities about this particular "ism" that cannot be said of many other modernist genres is that conceptual art is often accessible to everyone simply on the basis of innate familiarity. Whereas it's a stretch for the average non-artist to be able to connect splashes of paint or a bronze sculpture to his or her own life, conceptual art often includes recognizable elements, giving it intrinsic inroads into just about every psyche.

Marcel Duchamp, the grand pooh-bah of conceptual art, taught the public that any object could be art, whether it was a bicycle wheel, a pipe, a urinal or a thermometer. It was a case of re-presenting the particular item in a new context, thereby investing it with fresh meaning by virtue of incongruous juxtapositions and shifting our preconceived ideas.

There is also an invigorating alchemy in the notion that a conceptual artist's true achievement is concealed in the moment of cognition on the part of the viewer. The thought that went into the conceiving and construction of a work reaches fruition upon the observer's interpretation and, ideally, grasping of intended meaning.

In BMAC's show, for example, Lynn Richardson has constructed three spectacular installations that shove our sense of security outside the proverbial box and onto its existential knees with the pretty suggestion that even though the ozone is disappearing — and that, make no mistake, it will be gone eventually — we can still look fabulous.

In "Iceberg Fashion Fur," a row of exotic winter jackets hangs along the wall, each affixed with a glaring orange life vest and in "Inter-Glacial Free Trade Agency," a dazzling array of perfectly plausible products such as the "All new, hypothermic eye gloss" in fetching colors like Midnight Sun assaults our senses, both political and primal. Taking in what is a full shelter's worth of ingenious, meticulously executed accoutrements de climate crisis — first aid kids, make-up, huge Swiss Army knives all carefully displayed as if in the window of an eco-disaster preparedness boutique — is a chilling experience, not only because of the patent probability of such a scenario, but aesthetically as well: everything is a perfectly icy, clinical blue, with a couple of foreboding Red Cross emblems emphasizing the doom of it all.

In "Icehouse: Artificial Hydroponic Fruit Juice Stand," a grove of opaque white squares create a frozen chaos of fragile thin ice churned up from a melting sea by watery indigo plastic rafts, like an Arctic lunar module enclosing a desperate attempt at salvation in the form of a faux-botanical lab. These tableaux bluntly imply that what certain world leaders continue to deny is inevitable and the assumed corporate glee at such environmental tragedy makes the prospect all the more alarming.

Angelo Arnold twists the knife in an altogether different though equally unsettling direction. "Not Today" is a lovely high-backed chair, upholstered in a golden jacquard satin, with polished dark wood arms and legs — and it is decidedly annoyed. The arms are folded in obvious contempt and the seat divided but tightly clenched like a fuming lover who's trying to make a point. "Loveseat" moves this novel concept from Seussian humor into surreal despair, collapsing in on itself with downcast headrest and sorrowful legs akimbo.

Considering the uncountable shades of humanity that regularly grace furniture — laughter, tears, conversation, lovemaking, sleep — such eloquent anthropomorphizing of these core household objects is profoundly evocative and made me wish there'd been a full room of Arnold's emotive mascots.

Other work in the show is equally powerful, including Harriet Caldwell's exquisite exploration of memory in "Brain Journaling," with nearly a hundred sheets of milky vellum bearing weakly penned words, Rorschach inkblots and small, barely visible images, as if hidden in recesses of the mind.

Alicia Renadette's "Harvest," a delicate veil crocheted from collected hair and "Assume the Position," a river of velvet-lined dishwashing gloves sprawled across the floor, are further examples of the visionary, refreshingly challenging work found throughout "In the Zone II," astutely curated by MassMoCA's Denise Markonish.

At its best, conceptual art is a sumptuous visual, intellectual and emotional feast, such as this show at BMAC (and at its worst, a bit like stale toast). There's an admirable audacity in this caliber of innovation that will inspire close inspection — and introspection — for those wise enough to see it. The sheer originality of thought is extraordinarily uplifting in execution and impact, and I'd venture to guess Mr. Kosuth would agree.

Online: brattleboromuseum.org

Annie: annieguyoncommunications.com

Quirky collections and early eco-wisdom: Edifying exhibits are the perfect tonic

Coming back from the left coast would have been easier if another 8 feet of snow had arrived in our absence but somehow, returning to what must be about the fifth mud-season so far this year, was harder. I'm starting to think it's a meteorological fifth dimension, with a groovy theme to go with it (sing along, everyone): "When the mud, is all around the house, and furniture is lined with soil."

When mud is all around the house, the yard, the sidewalks and the state, my tendency each weekend is to find fun things to do in places that are, by definition, dirt-free, and what better destination than museums? As mentioned herein last week, Vermont is home to a constellation of intriguing creative institutions filled with far more than just fine art.

There's the American Precision Museum, the Birds of Vermont Museum, the Cornish Colony Museum, the New England Transportation Museum, the Shelburne Museum and even the American Museum of Fly Fishing. Rumor has it there even used to be a Vermont Wax Museum renowned for its revolving Elvis but, alas, he's left the turntable as the place is now closed. The mind boggles at what else might have been in there … a marble-eyed Hetty Green savoring her fortune or an ashen Ethan Allen being charged with treason?

The top of my unconventional museums list, however — the mother of all treasure troves — is the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury. Vermont's much-celebrated field-trip favorite boasts more than 160,000 natural science, historical and cultural objects that 19th-century industrialist Franklin Fairbanks collected during extensive travels around the globe. Overflowing with everything from Victorian dolls, Egyptian sarcophagi and rare gemstones to paintings, textiles, farm tools and taxidermy — not to mention a planetarium and weather station — the Fairbanks is an ideal place to take friends and family for a remarkably engaging day steeped in vicarious sightseeing and international geographic illumination.

Soaking up this diverse collection is tantamount to taking a slightly surreal jaunt to other continents, distant cultures and past eras, an experience both abundant and intimate, if not occasionally daunting. During my first visit a while back with my daughter's class to what looks from the outside like a Victorian castle, I entered the massive main room, with its barrel-vaulted oak ceiling, and was instantly transfixed by a startling tableau. Just through the main doors, a towering stuffed polar bear the size of a minivan rears up on his hind legs in frozen, bared-ivories rage, dwarfing a massive grizzly and two black bears nearby.

Taxidermy isn't everyone's cup of tea but there is something profoundly stirring, albeit a tad spine-chilling, about being able to examine such gorgeous, colossal creatures up-close and personal. Watching bears on the Discovery Channel or pacing inside far-off cages surrounded by cement moats affords a modicum of enlightenment, of course, yet this was the first time I'd ever been in such close proximity to a species that's universally feared and revered, and it gave me a whole new perspective on their plight.

When I spoke to the Fairbanks Museum's Anna Rubin, she revealed that my reaction was not uncommon and also offered crucial and informative insights into the singular passion and purpose of Mr. Fairbanks who, I gathered, was something of an amateur Darwin of his milieu.

"The practice of collecting natural specimens in the late 1800s was not perceived in the same way we might look at it today," she explained. "It was really in the cause of science and wanting to preserve these animals so they could be studied and protected. All the pieces in the museum are from that era."

Before establishing the museum in 1891, he regularly invited the public into his home to see his "cabinet of curiosity" in which he displayed his eclectic collection, which contains items of international, national and regional interest. One of my favorite displays was on the second-floor balcony, which is brimming with shelves, cabinets and cases of antique dolls, vintage toys and various household and historical artifacts.

Inside a low vitrine is a group of personal possessions dating from the Civil War. I was particularly moved by a small, lovingly handmade sewing kit, given by a local 15-year-old girl to her sweetheart before he left to fight. One can only assume it was found out on a battleground, and the inclusion of that kind of human iconography in the context of a museum containing more than 3,000 natural specimens reflects Fairbanks' holistic view of the world and its inhabitants.

Fairbanks would come back from his trips with assorted pelts, weapons, insects, photographs, costumes, shells and other discoveries that could help to edify his friends and colleagues back in Vermont. Having inherited great wealth from his uncle, who invented the platform scale and founded the Fairbanks Scale Co., Franklin Fairbanks was committed to giving back to his hometown and integrated his own zeal for travel into this impulse.

"He was like many Victorian civic-minded family members who felt a real love for the community," said Rubin. "He wasn't a scientist or scholar but out of a deep appreciation for nature, he brought to this isolated part of New England these views of animals and visions of other parts of the world."

Working with local, self-taught taxidermist William Balch, Fairbanks eventually built a museum to house his finds, an eccentric landscape unto itself, filled with recreations of the flora and fauna that he'd come to cherish in places he knew most of his friends, family and neighbors would never see.

Balch proved to be an innovator in exhibit design as well, crafting lush, convincing dioramas in which he placed the exotic creatures he'd carefully preserved, deftly utilizing materials of the day, such as linen (this was long before plastic's time) to create the illusion of natural habitats. With the same scientific authenticity and remarkable eye for detail that was being employed in New York City's Natural History Museum right around the same time, Balch was, as Rubin reverently put it, "at the cutting edge of interpreting the natural world."

Together, the two men filled custom-made wood-and-glass cases with meticulously arranged environments, including a truly exquisite display of what is thought to be the world's largest collection of hummingbirds. With 131 shimmering specimens presented on realistic-looking trees, replete with nests, under glass at eye-level, it is yet another of the museum's many breathtaking exhibits.

Everyone at the museum clearly venerates Mr. Fairbanks' pioneering sensibilities and generosity of spirit, and with good reason. Though through our 21st-century lens we might consider a room full of posed animals in ersatz environs to be tacitly un-P.C., everything Rubin taught me about Fairbanks' motivations and expansive thinking as a true animal lover convinced me that, were he alive today, he'd probably be out there picketing for PETA and holding fund-raisers for Greenpeace.

The entire collection of the Fairbanks Museum is a manifestation of its founder's global sensibilities, which were evident in his respect for cultural diversity, an abiding love of nature and a staunch devotion to the stewardship of all the world's creatures. It is sobering and inspiring to realize that his visionary achievements pre-saged the very issues with which the human race now struggles, on so many fronts.

Eloquently summing up the magnitude of Fairbanks' accomplishments, Rubin said it best: "The museum is a timepiece, about the Victorian understanding of the natural world and the awesome beauty of these creatures."

Online: www.fairbanksmuseum.org

Postcard from California: Absence makes the art more cherished

As I write, I'm sitting in the café of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art amid a sea of mod wood tables surrounded by a bold exhibit of large-format, close-up photos depicting brightly colored plates of plastic bits and pieces, monochromatic meals comprised of saturated, bright blue, orange or green combs, curlers, gears, spoons and other small objects. When I brought my kids here a few days ago, my daughter said it was "weird art" and that she liked it.

I remember her saying the exact same thing while gazing up at Andy Warhol's huge, high-contrast, vividly hued portraits at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center's exhibit four years ago. Likewise, her brother thought Spheris Gallery's show of Donald Saaf and Julia Zanes' fanciful paintings in Bellows Falls a while back was "totally cool" and he's made the same assessment in front of a few über-hip west coast walls throughout this vacation.

This morning, when we stopped in at a high-end gallery up the street — one of San Francisco's top purveyors of contemporary art where years ago I was co-director — they said the paintings, which were all minimalist squares of glossy enamel, were boring and that they liked Vermont art more. I have to admit, I agree, though I'm surprised by my somewhat blasé reaction to the breadth of wild art here because usually when I come out I'm a hopeless culture vulture.

Here in this crowded, costly cultural oasis, where we've seen a number of off-the-grid exhibits during a fun and fulfilling visit to the Bay Area from where we moved to Vermont seven years ago, I've actually found the art scene more irksome than iconic. I thought I'd be a veritable sponge, soaking up every ounce of S.F.'s world-class art exhibits, illustrious literary heritage and renowned music scene but in the three years since our last visit, something in me has changed. To put it simply, it's because of this column.

When I first approached Randal Smathers, the Rutland Herald's fearless editor, with the idea of writing a regular spotlight on Southern Vermont arts and culture, part of me was unsure as to whether there really was enough going on to merit a weekly column. Oh, me of little faith, my worries couldn't have been more unfounded, for there is so very much happening in the lower Green Mountains that I quickly learned it was far more a question of what not to write about than finding something good to cover.

In the nearly two years since the Sover Scene was born, I've become well-versed in the oodles of galleries, museums, literary centers, music venues, playhouses, move theaters, dance events, book stores, CD shops and sundry cultural festivals, forums, summits and sanctuaries that thrive in the region.

I remember that, prior to our big move out east, some of my friends and associates here were worried that I'd be culturally isolated with not enough intellectual stimulation to feed my thirsty, artsy soul. Heck, I wondered too, fretting that perhaps all the fascinating online arts organizations that had inspired me to explore Vermont as a potential home would prove to be little more than empty ethereal promises of a culturally rich existence.

Yet within, oh, all of 20 hours after rolling into Vermont, those fears were duly allayed, for on our first drive around Bellows Falls we ended up in a gallery on Canal Street watching a Nigerian dancer perform to live traditional drumming. I recall looking down at my kids' upturned faces, their mouths and eyes open wide at the beautiful, bead-festooned man shaping the air with elegant arms and pounding the floor with strong, sinewy legs to a pulsing djembe accompaniment. I remember thinking, "They aren't going to miss out on anything."

That was just the beginning of my edification on the diverse creative happenings that take place in Vermont on a regular basis, from international film festivals and pivotal fine art retrospectives to premier performances starring eminent actors and informative lectures by distinguished political experts.

During this trip out west, I've not only been reminded that Vermonters are in no way deprived of top-notch creative and intellectual resources, but have also come to appreciate one crucial element of the cultural experience that makes every exhibit and performance far more powerful and pleasant: access.

Take my trip here, to one of the most popular destinations for Bay Area art lovers, for example. Though I drove only a few miles from where I'm staying at a friend's house near Golden Gate Park, it took me 40 minutes to get here and 20 minutes to find parking, which, like the museum entrance fee itself, cost $12. So with an hour of gasoline and another 20 minutes looking for parking at the other end, just getting to the museum door and back is a two-hour, $30-plus venture. Then there's the $2.50 cups of coffee here in the café, but don't get me started.

Though the exhibits themselves are exquisitely curated and displayed, the epic black marble lobby seems more like a cavernous corporate atrium than a museum and I was not surprised when, upon entering, my son asked, "Where's the art?" Good question. After scaling three flights of a dramatic central staircase that's floodlit by a massive round skylight, we finally found the art, but, having been spoiled by the less ostentatious yet equally high-caliber venues back home, such as the Southern Vermont Arts Center, the Bennington Museum and BMAC, the trek seemed absurd.

The show we finally found was interesting, however, and the kids liked it. "America By Car," an expansive series of Lee Friedlander's black-and-white photographs, documents a trip throughout the United States with multi-faceted images that use car mirrors and windows to reframe various corners of the country in inventive, thought-provoking ways.

Afterward, we headed over to the Exploratorium, a hands-on science and discovery museum replete with inventors' lab and "Tactile Dome," but, again, the congested streets, parking hassle and steep entrance fee sure took the sheen off the experience for me and, once inside, I noticed that the kids seemed far less engaged than when we go Norwich's Montshire Museum. With its enlightening, interactive exhibits on nature, astronomy, science and the environment and a great educational program, not to mention the outdoor water sculpture garden, hiking trails and groovy fog machine (which, admittedly, would be redundant in S.F.), the Montshire is everything a parent could want for their kids and easy access to boot.

We're headed back to Vermont tomorrow and — though it's been a great trip with lots of family visits, fun with old friends, running on beaches and panning for gold in the foothills, not to mention a terrific jaunt southward to Disneyland — we're all looking forward to coming home.

Thanks to their culture-vulture mom, the kids have seen some great art and have been wonderful gallery-goers throughout, but their quota is definitely full. Yesterday, I wanted to show them around the Stanford campus and after parking the car near a grove of trees, I mentioned the wonderful nearby museum. Almost simultaneously, they both wailed, "No more museums, Mom!" before bolting from the car to run, climb and swing from the trees.

They're homesick for Vermont and, as of a few minutes ago, after discovering two photos I'd initially overlooked up in the Friedlander exhibit, I am too. One depicts a corner in Bellows Falls, the other a porch in Putney and the sigh I let out upon seeing both confirms what I've suspected through this entire trip. I left my heart in Southern Vermont.

Move over Martha, Angelica's in town: Savvy 18th C. painter pre-saged feminism

Most of us assume that super stardom is a phenomenon of the last century, a product of the mass media catapulting actors, musicians, writers and other creative types into the public arena via branding through television, film, the Internet and tabloid-gorged pop culture. Though we're regularly bombarded with the ventures and visages of contemporary idols, both ersatz and authentic, and it all seems singularly moderne and cutting edge, it's not.

If we consider such ubiquitous marketing tactics to be the hallmark of post-industrial revolution communications, how then do we explain 18th-century neo-classical painting sensation and cultural über-icon, Angelica Kauffman, who had a similarly diverse and widespread impact on European society that women like Madonna, Oprah and Di have had on ours?

Though her fame wasn't manifest in the form of music videos, magazines, haute couture or talk shows, in the context of the late 1700s, Kauffman was, for all intents and purposes, Fortune 500, rock-star royalty. Her intellect and charisma was renowned and her imagery infiltrated elite echelons and everyday life in the form of lampshades, fans, calendars, architectural design, interior décor and teacups, which is all to say, she was an omni-mediated Martha Stewart in her own time.

Quoting an engraver of the day who was overwhelmed with orders for Kauffman prints, Dartmouth art history professor and Kauffman scholar, Angela Rosenthal, attests that, "The whole world was Angelica-mad." And Rosenthal — who will be delivering what is sure to be an absorbing presentation on Kauffman Wednesday at Brooks Memorial Library in Brattleboro — is the person to ask.

With a new, handsome 350-page book out — "Angelica Kauffman: Art and Sensibility," which just won this year's Historians of British Art prize in the pre-1800 category — Rosenthal is a fountain of details, personal and professional, about her subject, as well as captivating contextual insights that illuminate the academic and social climate in which Kauffman's star rose so dramatically.

When we spoke earlier this week, I was curious as to how it was possible that a woman born in 1741 could have possibly enjoyed such a successful career — which included painting portraits of kings and queens and establishing the Royal College of Art in London — when 150 years later women still were not being admitted to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Apparently, it pertained more to a serendipitous and somewhat esoteric shift in socio-cultural ideals than a sudden wave of progressive thinking. "This age of sensibility was associated with private, feminine virtues, emotionality and the language of the heart," explained Rosenthal. "Women were considered the experts of these virtues in that time and Kauffman was a skilled artist, a great businesswoman and very sociable. When people sat for her, they also wanted to talk to her."

Born in Switzerland, Kauffman lost her mother at age 16, and thereafter followed her Austrian father, a traveling painter, back to Italy, where she'd already spent much of her childhood studying ancient Greek statuary and masters of the Renaissance. She eventually fell in with the English "grand tour" crowd and, soon after being welcomed into Rome's Academy of St. Luke at age 22, she moved to London, where her reputation as an extraordinarily skilled painter and sublime conversationalist preceded her.

"She had already painted leading Shakespeare interpreter, mega-celebrity of the day, David Garrick," said Rosenthal. "She was known as 'the painter of Garrick.'" In those days, such accolades that linked artists to beloved figures of the stage or throne heralded immediate almost rabid adoration by the teeming masses

As one critic phrased it, Kauffman "burst upon the hemisphere of painting as a luminous wonder," with her widely celebrated romantic aesthetic, whose glowing palette and romantic subject matter seemed to intoxicate the viewing public, including royalty.

Her faithful reinterpretations of classical figures, grouped together using ancient devices of composition, poses and gesture, were set against verdant backgrounds and incorporated symbolic elements such as lyres, lambs and scrolls (the arts, innocence and education, respectively).

Kauffman's soft, peaceful portraits were not simply poetic odes to beauty and nature, they reflected the aesthetics and values of the period in pivotal ways that served to challenge the perception of gender roles and relations.

"Later in the 18th century, we had 'men of feeling,'" expounds Rosenthal. "It was a sentimental culture when the female voice appeared in literature with Samuel Richardson's novel "Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded" and it transformed rough masculinity. Toughness and violence did not reign but, instead, emotional depth."

Even in light of this cultural swell toward the feminine perspective, Kauffman's monumental academic and professional accomplishments remain remarkable today when one considers that it was an age when few women achieved great success or distinction.

Rosenthal finds the evolution and impact of Kauffman's achievements entirely pertinent to societal obstacles and inner messages with which women continue to wrestle today. "If it is held to be somehow something that women don't do, then women themselves hold this mores. It is a mentality of the time that we enforce — not just men who prohibit women from doing what they want to do, but the whole patriarchal culture. Certainly, Kauffman tried to negotiate this, she was trying to please and the ideal of femininity was regarded of the arbiter of this taste."

"German poet Johann Gottfried von Herder called Kauffman 'the most cultivated person in Europe,'" continued Rosenthal. "So if she had intelligent people sitting for portraits, she had to be polished, speak different languages, be charming and flattering without being too submissive. In portraiture you're on equal footing because the sitter is vulnerable in the hands of the artist and that equation was loaded in the 18th century."

Considering the stature of Kauffman's subjects, this dynamic must have been particularly thrilling for her and propelled her career forward at an unprecedented clip, into uncharted territory. "When Queen Charlotte sat for Kauffman," affirmed Rosenthal, "her patronage instantly went up."

Kauffman was at the center of a vibrant intellectual milieu populated not only by wealthy patrons and monarchs, but by fellow female achievers of the day. "She cultivated relationships with a fantastic series of creative women and she made monumental portraits, almost female Temples of the Muses, or Parnassus. Women would sit for Kauffman because she was this cultured woman with a heightened sensibility."

Eighteenth-century English painter James Northcote encapsulated Kauffman's influence more than 200 years ago in a letter he wrote to her dearest friend and colleague, Sir Joshua Reynolds, in which he said Kauffman had become synonymous with successful women in the arts.

Rosenthal considers the lessons in Kauffman's remarkable professional trajectory to be entirely germane to the continuing need for contemporary girls and women to be inspired and challenged. "It's important for 21st-century women to know about women of the past," she said. "It's great to see powerful, creative women who succeeded and contributed fundamentally to the culture."

At last year's bicentennial commemoration of her death, Kauffman's achievements were once again lauded when Austria went all out to honor its favorite female artisan and Rosenthal was clearly moved by the enthusiasm accorded her longtime academic subject.

"At the opening celebration, there were 800 invited guests, plus a documentary film about her and they put her portrait on the Austrian shilling and a new stamp," marveled Rosenthal, who delivered a talk at the event. "She's a national hero there."

In describing the festivities, Rosenthal reflected candidly on her own joy at seeing Kauffman so deservingly lionized. "Sometimes scholarship is a lonely endeavor between you and the work of art, so this was astonishing for me."

Angelica Kauffman's achievements are astonishing to anyone who explores them, as is Rosenthal's wisdom and zeal on the topic. Take advantage of her remarkable expertise by heading to Brooks Library on Wednesday — and bring your daughters.

Online: www.brooks.lib.vt.us

Bristling with humanity: The primal grace of painter Sean Scully

Brutal. Emphatic. Melancholy. Argumentative.

These are a few of the terms with which Irish painter Sean Scully recently described his massive, layered abstractions during a talk at Dartmouth a few days after an expansive exhibition of his work opened at the Hood Museum.

Unlike many artists who prefer to let the work speak for itself or for whom the very notion of attempting to articulate its meaning with language is antithetical to the process, Scully sinks his intellectual teeth into discussion of his art with the same might and hunger that he puts into the making of it.

Addressing a house so packed with disciples that the college had to set up a live feed in an off-site hall across the green, Scully candidly and fervently elucidated a comprehensive overview of his work, starting with the sharp-edged, geometrically patterned early canvasses from the 1970s and bringing us to his more brooding panels of the present.

The show, which runs through March 9, fills the entire top floor of the Hood with 23 paintings ranging from book-size to mammoth, as well as a room containing a few of Scully's photographs and a documentary video of the artist in his element.

"The Art of the Stripe" was organized by the Hood Museum with no subsequent venues slated and is a rare convergence of some of Scully's strongest works, sagely curated and presented in a flow that fluently conveys the evolution of his personal, poetic and plastic sensibilities.

Fittingly, the first piece our eyes find at the top of the stairs is a pivotal work from 1987 called "Precious," one of the last paintings Scully made containing stripes extending from one edge of the canvas to the other before he began working primarily with the finite bands of color that have come to be emblematic of his distinct aesthetic.

Contained in a 72-inch square are six wide horizontal stripes, alternating red and white, with the center of the canvas inset by a smaller painting of thin horizontal and vertical strips of black and white. At first glance a straightforward exploration of pigmentation, depth of field and line — with the inner image optically receding and hues dimmed as if by age — the inexorable force of the painting emerges slowly, its outer border becoming a swath of a mammoth flag while patterns within suggest prison garb and a jail-cell window.

Here Scully's stripes sound an initial alarm, as if warning us to stay back, yet as we approach and see that the white is not an institutional clean, but a shifting patchwork of pale grays and creams, there is a fragility that inevitably pulls us in. That it was inspired by fearful childhood memories of sailing across the Irish Sea during his family's move from Dublin to England is evidence that Scully's layering has profoundly emotional dimensions as well.

The captain pacing back and forth across the deck, the post-WWII mines which randomly obliterated boats on a regular basis and the unnervingly opaque fog that Scully described are all contained in this ostensibly reductive piece. "Precious" is about familiarity, family and survival and exemplifies the depth in all of his work.

While discussing the period when he made this painting's predecessor — a far more restrained yet equally potent version, rendered in a vivid, sour palette six years prior — he was characteristically veracious.

"In the early '80s, I started to make paintings compositional and sculptural because I felt that painting had argued itself out," he insisted. "It was a question of what to do after the perfection, the elegance and the austerity of minimalism reached its zenith."

The earliest pieces in the show reveal the beginnings of this inner dialogue that had Scully fully immersed in the possibilities of the stripe as a versatile visual device before he shed the limiting vestiges of the period and pushed forward to a more vociferous means of limning and coloration.

Just as Rothko's field paintings take on greater depth of meaning when we explore his early surrealist interpretations of mythology and Hans Hofmann's later abstractions become yet more vibrant in light of his interior still lifes, Scully's more recent works are duly illuminated by the empirical soil from which they grew.  It was during a 1969 trip to Morocco when bold strips of color used for rugs and tents harnessed Scully's verdant curiosity, infusing his entire direction with a methodology he deems "if not radical, somewhat ornery."

The stripe, it turns out, is one historically loaded term — rooted in the German "die Strieme" or "mark on the body" — going back as far as biblical references to the lash and enduring numerous periods of patently nefarious connotations since.

In his 2001 book, "The Devil's Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric," Michel Pastoureau asserts that the stripe came to signify membership in "certain categories of reprobates or outcasts," including jesters, whores, derelicts, dissenters and those already ostracized by society for perceived satanic associations based on appearance, nationality or legal status.

Thirteenth-century Paris looked so suspiciously upon Palestinian Carmelites who came into town wearing brown-and-white striped habits that the uproar resulted in Pope Boniface VIII banning stripes theretofore in all religious attire. Even animals were not exempt from pejorative connotations, with tigers as suspect as traitors.

While it is a compelling notion to think that Scully's stripes are roiling with the same dastardly implications that labeled miscreants and villains, his own explication of motivations and meaning shed a far less sensational — yet extraordinarily brilliant — light upon what has been more than four decades of building luminous and lugubrious patterns with oblong segments of color.

More psychology than stigma, Scully's gravitation toward the stripe reflects an inner struggle, a relentless battle between forces with which we are all familiar, but that he continually excavates, examines, weighs and questions in the context of heavily worked, pigment-laden paintings.

"I paint in a way that is somewhat insecure," he attested at Dartmouth. "Color can include a sense of doubt and my earlier paintings can be saturated with it, overloaded, where there's a reference to Phil Spector's Wall of Sound."

This raw candor infuses his work with a poignant nakedness that often hides beneath the bravado of monumental scale, insistent borders and vociferous, earthy hues. From afar, the heroism of Scully's largest pieces fills the room with a visual swagger constructed of bulky, deep-toned blocks crammed tightly into epic expanses that assume the omnipresence of urban congestion, towering stone walls or brawny river embankments.

"Dakar," from 1989, is one of many such canvases that Scully assembled by screwing thick, linen-wrapped stretchers together into Herculean puzzles, each section an oversized, aggressively painted tablet in and of itself. The last of its kind before his return to traditional single-stretcher paintings, it is a prime example of the complex fusion of pictorial vigor, experiential reference and emotive weight that inhabits Scully's entire oeuvre.

"It refers to John Coltrane's album called 'Dakar'," he explained. "There is a lot of sensuality in my work that I attach to elemental drawing. They're glum and there can be a sense of menace. I believe in the idea of a universal language and I'm quite sure I'll never give that up."

The balance Scully strikes between this salty ferocity of spirit, tacit vulnerability and multi-layered denotation is a product of the spatial tension he creates through crucial choices of palette, gesture and composition. Throughout the exhibit, we are drawn toward each painting by a cool, ubiquitous magnetism, but at close proximity, an abiding tenderness and reverence becomes palpable, if not intoxicating.

In "Holly," a 2004 series of 15 paintings hung in chapel-formation, one large altar-piece stationed at the end of the room reveals, upon close inspection, overtly gentle variations in brushwork, with thin veils of bright hues shifting and glowing like embers beneath muted, ragged-edged slabs.

With symphonic, dynamic rhythm, "The Art of the Stripe" is a potent, eloquent presentation of Scully's remarkable ability to make paintings that are at once ominous and tranquil, blunt and meditative, initially harsh and ultimately seductive. Even his most hulking fortifications evoke an enigmatic inscrutability no less fraught with uncertainty and hope than we simple viewers.

Scully, of course, twigs it. "There is nothing to solve, just arenas of experience. Energetic, life-affirming, red-hearted paintings covered in melancholia, like their author."

Online: www.hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu

Annie: annieguyoncommunications.com

The gift of art: Creative giving offers treasures untold

The other day I brought home a photograph I'd had framed to give to a friend for Christmas. Taken by Troy Paiva, a consummate night photographer out west, it shows a rotund and immobile but poignantly beautiful 1950s-era Cadillac surrounded by tumbleweeds in a high-desert junkyard near Joshua Tree National Park, its outdated plates hanging on by two bolts and unmistakable, one-of-a-kind detailing still distinct.

Admiring the finished piece before wrapping it, I was struck by the notion that when it comes to the ritual of gift-giving, original art is far more than simply a unique tchotchke. It's an unspoken way of honoring someone we care about. We're inspired by what we know to be true about a person, in this case, a passion for classic cars and a shared affinity for a particularly striking part of the country. It also connects diligent artist with devoted art patron, both of whom are unconventional guys who appreciate uncommon perspectives of the world around us.

Try finding all that on a shelf at Wal-Mart.

When I look on my own shelves and walls, I realize I'm fairly well surrounded by heartfelt gifts that came from people who obviously know me well or with whom I share a favorite interest or two.

There's the strange and wonderful small black box that sits atop my mantle and bears the words "Oblique Strategies" in gold along one side. An obtuse, limited-edition objet d'art co-created in 1975 by ambient music guru and producer Brian Eno, it contains a deck of 123 cards, each of which has an enigmatic phrase written on one side, the other being solid black.

Whenever I look through the cards, which say things like "Cut a vital connection" or "Trust in the you of now," half the fun is rereading the crinkly, inky letter I keep folded at the bottom of the box, which accompanied the deck when my Scottish friend Joe sent it a couple of decades ago. Seeing his return Edinburghian address is always a fringe benefit, as it transports me momentarily to one of my favorite cities on the planet and has me reflecting on how far we've come in our lives since then. An Eno disciple on the dole when I first met him, Joe's now a top music-industry exec in London who periodically sends e-mails letting me know that the Right and Honorable Mr. Eno came by his office again that week. So it's turned into a thoroughly groovy gift that keeps on giving, existentially and vicariously.

Likewise, a small, oval container — made of oxidized metal and housing a few ounces of lavender buds under its screened lid — sits on my bookshelf and has come to symbolize a cherished 25-year bond with my good friend Tamara, picture-framer to the stars of the San Francisco art world, who bought it from a local sculptor and gave it to me many moons ago. The powdery patina deepens each year and whenever I refill it with fresh lavender buds, I always think of her — diminutive and strong as steel — just like her cool gift. I've always loved art made with industrial materials and her consideration in combining that with my favorite flower was and still is extraordinarily meaningful to me.

Sitting on the same shelf is a hand-dipped candle given to me by my oldest friend Daphne, which, for the life of me, I cannot burn. It's got sage leaves somehow embedded into it, which is fitting as she's one of the wisest people I've ever known, whose counsel has been an anchor for me since we met in ninth grade 30 years ago. Maybe the next time she visits, we'll light it, but then I won't have it there to remind me of her, so … maybe not.

And then there are the handmade glass earrings that my dear friend Ann gave to me on my last birthday, which, goes without saying, make me think of her and our precious friendship whenever I wear them. No huge analogy there, beyond the fact that they're absolutely extraordinary, wonderfully luminous and positively incomparable, but I'm sure she wasn't thinking any of that when she bought them for me; she just thought they looked like my style and she was right.

The art on my walls pretty much tells my life story as well because of the generosity of various friends who've put great thought into personalized presents over the years.

An 1896 lithograph by William Bradley, depicting a Victorian woman riding on a sturdy, old-fashioned bicycle across a stylized field of poppies, was a thoughtful Mother's Day gift from my kids that was entirely orchestrated by their Dad, who knew it would remind me of my Mum, who'd just passed away. She never drove a car, but rode her trusty Raleigh every day to and from work through a 30-year career. Every time I look at that picture, I think of her, her tenacity, my kids and their terrific Dad.

Above a door in my kitchen is a black-and-white taken by Dirk Bleicker, a photographer friend in Berlin, Germany, who, during a trip to S.F. years ago, took an overhead close-up of the hands of my roommate Iris as they were cracking open an egg over her dress-covered lap and out-of-focus feet below. Her delicate fingers and the familiar pattern of our old kitchen floor beyond them trigger many fond memories of all the talks, soirees and fuzzy-headed breakfasts we shared in that kitchen. When Iris — who has remained a beloved and altogether down-to-earth friend — visited last year, "Das Kleid," or "The Dress," as Dirk chose to call it, made us laugh with all its dramatic eccentricity and it gives me a chuckle and a reminder of her sporting nature every day.

I suppose this is all a case in point that it's also the thought that counts: These folks could give me a bucket of dirt and I'd display it fondly.

Sometimes, though, gifts come from surprising quarters, often bringing unexpected insight into the giver.

Hanging prominently above my couch is a handsome, minimalist etching by eminent Bay Area painter Christopher Brown and its meaning to me is multi-faceted and substantial. A square of stacked, horizontal rows of individually-sketched cannon balls, entitled "60 Good Ways To End a Sentence," it is a perfect marriage of the two most important staples of my intellectual existence: art and writing about art. Brown was immersed in the Civil War when he made the piece nearly 20 years ago and the lines of grapeshot — in light of the literary title he gave it — have always been symbolically motivating to me as a writer, as if urging me to keep loading the cannon, to just keep writing.

The fact that this inspiring prized possession came from the imperious, acerbic gallery owner for whom I worked at the time — when I was fresh out of college and too broke to afford art — offers a lesson about life as well. I still scratch my head over how a person who was seemingly self-absorbed and dismissive could have understood me and my aspirations so acutely as to have bestowed this profoundly significant gift upon me. It's become emblematic of my professional journey and I'll always be grateful that she took the time and consideration to honor who I was and who I wanted to become.

Again, try finding any of that at your local "Tarjay."

With so much high-caliber art surrounding us right here in Southern Vermont, instead of doing the big-box thing this year, I encourage everyone to head to nearby galleries, museum gift shops, craft stores and artists' cooperatives instead, with all the unique traits, tastes and dreams of relatives and friends in mind.

Here are just a few options to get you started — now go forth and buy art!

Online

www.brattleboromuseum.org

www.benningtonartsguild.org

www.buyvermontart.com

www.galleryatthevault.com

www.svac.org

www.lostamerica.com

Grafitti art augments ancient continuum and highlights human creativity

A few weeks ago, as I was walking along Eliot Street in downtown Brattleboro, I became aware of a metallic "tchank … tchank … tchank" piercing the crisp morning air, but because each dense clang was so brief, I couldn't locate the source. Upon nearly tripping over a kneeling, chisel-wielding man, who had thus far limned the first few loops of a spiral into the middle of huge sidewalk tile, I finally figured it out. 

Each time I passed by en route to meetings throughout the rest of the day, I saw his line fanning out further into energetic curves and angles, eventually filling the entire stone. I reckoned that whoever owns the nearby store sure has a wonderfully bold, enterprising aesthetic.

It wasn't until a few days later when I received a press release from the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center about their current "Street To Studio" exhibit, which runs through Dec. 21st, that I realized who had been pounding that dynamic design into the sidewalk: Ken Hiratsuka, consummate stone carver whose "one line" compositions began in the context of the 1980s graffiti art scene and which now grace sidewalks, walls, slabs and boulders around the globe.

Hiratsuka, along with painter Brian Gormley, who works in Ireland and Pennsylvania, and Brattleboro painter Scot Borofsky will talk about his work at BMAC tonight and, if the absorbing conversation I recently had with him is any indication, it's sure to be a compelling evening.

Twenty-five years ago, when Hiratsuka first began hammering designs into New York City sidewalks after moving from Japan to attend art college, he carved street tiles wherever he could, either for his own creative expression or at the request of others. Unfortunately, though, in an era when graffiti artists were brandishing spray cans and paintbrushes all over NYPD turf, even a humble stone carver risked persecution and so it happened that Hiratsuka once spent a night in the clink after the police halted a piece commissioned by a bar owner.

In those days, when his fee was usually a couple of beers and a handshake, Hiratsuka's muse and methodology were still evolving.

"I was into public art and the nature of the city and I was thinking about my participation as an artist," he explained. "I wanted to make huge work and I thought 'what can I do, why did I come here?' Looking around Soho I saw that many sidewalks are made of thick granite blocks. I liked this kind of mischief so I did it in a couple of places but when the police started beating me up with a broomstick, that was my starting point. Then I knew I had to take proper steps to do this work."

Beneath pragmatic considerations, however, there lies a philosophical core to Hiratsuka's creative expression, one that's germane to the political, spiritual and geographic differences he sees dividing the world.

"I reached a point when I thought that Earth is one huge rock floating in the universe and I will carve a big rock with one line that never crosses itself," he recalled. "It is a 'thought experience' that I turn into permanent drawings."

With carvings on gray granite in the Gobi Desert, pink granite in Finland, white marble along the shores of Istanbul's Sea of Marmara, limestone in Ibiza, sandstone in Santa Fe and a 7'-long block of black andesite at the foot of Mount Fuji in Japan, Hiratsuka has placed himself in the context of an ancient continuum both human and geologic.

Thus far, he has carved stones in 19 countries and, though his goal is 200, his motivation is intriguingly counter-intuitive. "Countries are like live cells — they grow up and disappear due to wars."

Such contemplation informs Hiratsuka's views on stones as well as settings. "In deserts stone turns into sand. Bronze is the strongest metal but fire melts it. Stone is the power of the Earth," he attests, "and I'm living at the end of the Stone Age."

Indeed, with ancient petroglyphs right here in Windham County, Hiratsuka's carving on the sidewalk of Brattleboro becomes part of a larger, universal dialogue across humanity and millennia.

"My work is a record of human beings," he declares. "Art is used for telling stories — it's human necessity. If a dinosaur footprint is a fossil, why aren't the chisel marks of human beings fossils?"

Since truth is often stranger than fiction, on a few occasions, Hiratsuka's carvings, which he never signs, have been "discovered" in remote areas and mistaken for markings made by ancient cultures.

One of his carvings, on a stone six-feet in diameter that sits on the Montauk shoreline, had some folks convinced that a massive trans-millennial gift from Meso-America had been left in exchange for the USS Eldridge, which they believe disappeared during WWI off the Long Island coast.

Another of Hiratsuka's carvings, in the backyard of a friend who lives in the Catskills, was the subject of a lengthy academic paper written by a team of archaeologists who deduced that the pattern dates back to 1,500 B.C., while still another group deemed one of his designs to be a prehistoric rendering over 20,000 years old.

Rather than being at all irked by such erroneous statements, Hiratsuka seems to marvel at the universal human impulse to feel connected to our primitive ancestors.

"I heard a spiritual guy once say that stone has a long vibration," he recalled, "and there's also a saying that stone doesn't speak much but it says a lot."

After watching footage of Hiratsuka methodically chiseling the Montauk piece — his hammer keeping a steady pace even as waves crashed over him — I was interested in how he establishes both design and cadence.

"I imagine a river sometimes, then the line gets liquid," he explains "like free image and also flock of universe, sky, invisible current of air. But all the time I have been continuing one continuous line till the end of time."

This innate poetry in his process is evident in the work itself. "Aqua I," a jagged slab of bluestone etched by a complex, geometric web of finely-chiseled white lines, is something of a 3-D, Escherian tessellation, its silhouette and topography reading like an architectural rendering of a newly formed continent.

These smaller pieces reveal Hiratsuka's astounding capacity for precision along with a palpable veneration for his medium, which started before his earliest memory.

"My mother told me that when I was little and the road in front of our house was being paved, I went out, took a bucket of stones and brought it inside. Now I do the same thing but the stones get bigger and bigger."

After living in New York City for 18 years, Hiratsuka recently relocated to a small village west of Woodstock and his studio includes a forge wherein he makes his own chisels, often reshaping them several times midway through a project.

With this authenticity of both technique and spirit and an unwavering predilection for using one line to complete each composition, Hiratsuka's carvings are vibrant, modern mandalas that eloquently articulate the essential conviction embedded in all of his work: An earnest, heartfelt belief that we are all one.

The entire Street to Studio show is a fluent and fervent homage to the inexorable urge we humans have to communicate and connect with one another. Accompanied by the vivid work of Gormley and Borofsky, as well as that of graffiti glitterati, the late Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, Hiratsuka's carvings epitomize the primordial ooze from whence more contemporary, painterly scrawlings spawned and is a moving testament to the tacit magnificence of stone.

Online: brattleboromuseum.org

Annie:  annieguyoncommunications.com

Wood, glorious wood: Festivals showcase forests to furniture

Most people have on their long list of hopes the dream vacation, the dream house or the dream car. For me, though, it was always the dream table.

I was never interested in interior design, per se, but had seen so many gorgeous, mod conference tables in art galleries where I'd worked throughout the years that I nursed a secret yearning to one day have a huge, contemporary dining room table made to similarly minimal specifications with some exquisite wood or another. And, having put myself through college as a picture framer, I was more aware of exotic woods than the average home furnishings customer.

After logging in seemingly endless hours cutting, sanding, finishing and assembling mouldings from around the globe, I knew my wengé from my curly bubinga, the former of which is a dark grey-brown pinstriped wood and the latter known for its distinctively vivid, cherry-colored waves of grain. Both are from Africa and are but two of dozens of striking woods I came across during my framing years and with which I had ongoing aesthetic love affairs, all the while wondering if this was the one — the wood I'd use when I finally had my dream table built.

For a while, it was the bold and beautiful Americans that wooed me: the buttery ash, warm maple, stately walnut and handsome oak. Then I became infatuated with warmer clime woods, such as the Mexican cocobolo, Hawaiian koa, Brazilian jatoba and Tanzanian tambootie. Eventually, however, I met a wood like no other and knew the minute I laid eyes on it that it would one day become my table: purpleheart, a positively luscious specimen, whose name says it all, from South America.

The color is like nothing else, particularly after it's been freshly chopped or sanded; think 1999 Beaucastel Châteauneuf du Pape or just your favorite raspberry jam. The hue is spectacularly rich, with a vivid, lush glow and a grain like the finest silk taffeta.

It also proved to be the heaviest, densest, most difficult material I'd ever tried to cut. After learning the hard way that it must be shaved in paper-thin slices, I was not surprised when the supplier informed me, a little too late, that it has "severe blunting effects" on saws and is so strong, they make diving boards out of it. Still, it was always worth every exasperated grumble and trashed mitre blade.

Nevertheless, though it made lovely picture frames, what I really wanted was The Table, so when I moved here to Vermont — the place whence Williams-Sonoma and Crate & Barrel obtained their best wooden ware — I knew the time had come to find a craftsperson who could make my dream come true. Mace Wicker not only came highly recommended and was completely amenable to using my basic — albeit massive — design, he also knew an ideal source for purpleheart, just up the road.

Woods of the World had huge 13-foot planks of 3-inch thick, rough purpleheart that, in its raw state, looks a bit like the flank of a prehistoric creature with gnarled bumps and a dull, gray exterior. I wondered if this could possibly be the same satiny, claretish stuff I was after. The proprietor explained that it most definitely was and, in answer to my eco-fretful questions, insisted it was from a fully vetted company with harvesting practices that do not in any way threaten the Amazonian rain forest. Whew! That would have been a deal breaker, so I was hoping for good news.

Within a couple of weeks, Mace and his helpers were lugging the most spectacular piece of furniture I'd ever seen into my house, in the form of a gleaming 77-inch by 42-inch slab of perfectly finished purpleheart and four block legs, all of which they bolted together using hidden steel plates that Mace had crafted specifically for this project. He'd also invented a decidedly Roman device consisting of two steel cross bars embedded in the table's underside, to prevent it from warping. Five years, countless dinner parties, household projects, homework marathons and perpetual creative kids' chaos later and it's still my dream table — versatile, hip, elegant and as durable as a boulder.

So, when I set out to do a bit of research on the Vermont Fine Furniture and Woodworking Festival — which takes place this weekend in Woodstock — the first thing I looked for on the Web site was Mace's name. Surprised not to find it, I thought I'd better check in and make sure my table hadn't destroyed his creative zeal as well as his saw blades.

Before I had a chance to ask about his woodworking career, we were recalling the monumental undertaking that was my table, chuckling in retrospect about the perhaps inadvisable decision to use such a formidable wood for it and eventually ended up talking about trees, rare and regional, and the many benefits and hardships of being a woodworker in Vermont.

When I asked if any woods are now considered endangered, specifically purpleheart (e.g. should I feel guilty when I spread the N.Y. Times across my table or not), he explained that purpleheart is, in fact, often considered a "junk" wood in the sense that during the harvesting of mahogany trees, which is more controversial, they frequently find purpleheart growing wild among them and take them out as well. Of course, the dolphin-tuna equation popped into my head, but my concern was duly assuaged and we continued what was a wonderfully informative conversation during which I learned all kinds of things about the wild variations in trends, widths and pricing in the industry.

A couple of days later, my talk with Kathleen Wanner, assistant director of the Vermont Wood Manufacturers Association and one of the organizers of this weekend's Vermont Fine Furniture and Woodworking Festival, was equally enthusiastic and knowledgeable.

"We're building awareness of the authenticity, tradition and integrity of locally-made wood products and the long history of fine craftsmanship in Vermont," Wanner explained. "Most of the woodworkers here are very environmentally conscious and if they can't use regional wood, they try to make sure it comes from sustainably managed forests."

The Woodworking Festival features the work of 40 artisans, 12 of whom will be demonstrating their skills, with great music and food throughout the day as well. The event dovetails with the Forest Festival, sponsored by Marsh-Billings Rockefeller National Park, which includes a junior ranger program on environmental stewardship, wildlife habitats and clean air and water. In addition, there will be horse-drawn carriage rides, a working sawmill demonstration, lessons in making walking sticks and the Audubon Society will lead bird watching walks.

"When we first moved to this location three years ago, we thought it would make sense to do these as companion events and it's been a great partnership with Marsh-Billings," Wanner said. "A shuttle bus runs back and forth all day, so folks can see and purchase furniture and crafts and learn about forest ecology as well. It's very hands-on and interesting for all ages."

Vendors range from sole-proprietorships to large furniture-making companies, but I was curious as to whether solo craftsmen with small home workshops — like Mace — participate as well. "They do, though it's a challenge for us to find these folks who are working out in the backwoods making beautiful furniture one piece at a time," Wanner said.

As for whether Mace still does woodworking, alas, he does not. When I gingerly asked if it was my dream table that made him change careers he assured me, as best he could anyway, that it was more that he just wanted to switch gears, at least for the near future. These days, he installs woodstoves and was clearly tickled to report that one stove was recently delivered on a palette made of — what else — purpleheart.

Online: www.vermontwoodfestival.org