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Center piece The Forest and the Trees Said one newcomer to Litchfield County who saw a sign
advertising a ham shoot at the thickly wooded One country pleasure that has given rise to more creative probings are the growths of trees that crisscross the land as woods, be it the environs that nourished the musings of transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau while he kept his journal by Walden Pond or the forested area five times larger than the combined boroughs of New York that served as inspiration for Richard Strauss' 1868 opera, "Tales from the Vienna Woods."
The allure, then, of the countryside with its woods is besotting, not only for a giant of visual art, but also for a native of Birmingham, England, who created a spectacular life as an impresario and founder of the New York Pops and moved with his wife to New Milford nearly 30 years ago. "He was kind of a country boy at heart," said Nancy Cassidy White, a New Milford resident who once worked at The Silo Gallery at the Skitch Henderson's Hunt Hill Farm, referring to the entertainment legend who died late last year. "From everything that I used to watch, when he came to Connecticut, he wouldn't go to the store if there were crowds of people. When he came up to Connecticut, he came up to get away. He used to go out on his tractor and disappear." So it is small wonder that recent offerings at The Silo Gallery have been dedicated to country life, with its implied reference to the preservation of land that part of Mr. Henderson's property celebrates through the Hunt Hill Farm Trust Inc. Last fall's exhibition examined the subject through a wide prism. A farmhouse, a bale of hay, an autumn field-all were fodder for an exhibition on country life that ran from Nov. 5 to Dec. 31. The exhibition on country life that opened Feb. 11 has
a narrower charge: its subject matter is the woods, and The Silo's
erstwhile employee, Ms. White is among the exhibitors. "When we were kids, we used to go to the Naugatuck State Forest for picnics or to pick blueberries, what have you. In that state forest, there were a lot of hemlocks and wild rhododendrons growing in there. That's one of the memories I pulled from," Ms. White said recently, explaining the source for her cool, evocative pastel, "In Memory of Forests." "My parents are from Northern Maine and Canada. They're from way up north. That's also one of my favorite areas," she added, citing another area where the spruce trees with the soft, fragrant needles abound. "Hemlocks are gorgeous, and hemlocks are under siege. There's a parasite that is attacking the hemlocks. All the hemlocks in Connecticut were in danger of disappearing. That's part of what's behind this piece," she said, explaining that she works on a textured board, where she can rub the colors into the teeth. "What I like about doing these misty kind of pastels is bringing these ghostly images out of the mist and bringing them into the foreground, where they are visible," she said of the work's cloak of green-gray tones. 'There's this great flowering of In an exhibition whose two-dimensional pieces range broadly in style, Bridgewater resident Michael Chelminski has a work entitled "Dogwood Blossoms.' a pictorially shallow oil-on-canvas with white flowers hovering within a black ground broken by sharp green brushstrokes and daubs of paint. "There were still farms when I was growing up,” said
the Wilton native, who has native dogwoods surrounding his Litchfield County
house. “Some people paint landscapes. Some people paint figures. I've loved
landscapes since I was a child." Mr. Chelminski, who was interviewed by artist Josef Albers before he studied art at Yale University, has also found himself particularly interested in Oriental art. “It’s just the approach to nature that I'm interested in," he said, adding that he also applauds Chinese painting completed with a brush on silk. “Black and white with little color. Ink paintings." Although "Dogwood Blossoms" which Mr. Chelminski said to the mid-1990s, harks back to what he termed a transitional period as he moved toward the abstract style he practices today, he affirmed that it was one of several paintings of dogwoods he has done. "I did several of the dogwoods in the spring, before the landscape turns to dense green. There's this great flowering of dogwoods, and it fills the woods with a rush of white in the early spring. It's one of the events that happens here. It's sort of a great beginning of spring 'I love the country before everything turns to spinach," said the artist, whose works are in the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery and the Ft. Lauderdale Museum of Art in Florida, among others.
The Hunt Hill Farm acreage and its 10 historic buildings, which document the lives of the Connecticut farmers who worked there, has opened The Silo Gallery to a series of readings and exhibitions organized by the university entitled "Sights and Sounds," of which "Country Life: The Woods" is a part. "All the pieces were there," said Margaret Grimes, referring to the Fine Arts Program at the university, where she serves as program coordinator. The advisory board includes Mr. Henderson's wife, Ruth Henderson, who created The Silo, which also features a cooking school and a retail shop. A landscape painter who studied under Neil Weliver, Ms. Grimes has curated the country life exhibitions, with one of her landscapes, a large canvas where pieces of blue sky intermingle with sun-striped trees entitled "Dark Entry II," among the works on display. At the recent opening, Ms. Grimes, who lives in Washington, noted that the university was close to the abundant art resources in New York, as well as country land where the students could practice outdoors. With illustration as well as painting in full bloom in
Western Connecticut State University's art program, it makes sense that some
of the works in the exhibition at The Silo Gallery are by students who
intend to concentrate their skills in that field. Betty Anne Medeiros, who is pursuing her Master of Fine Arts degree in illustration, has completed work for such publications as Fine Gardening magazine, Country Journal and Scholastic. Her work in the exhibition, a small painting entitled "Kent, CT.," was completed near the Ned Anderson Bridge in Kent late last summer, on one of the occasions when she allowed herself to paint en plein air. "I usually paint any kind of subject in a far tighter style. A lot of the time I paint in watercolor," she said, acknowledging that, while she goes to the Kent countryside to paint, her husband travels to the waters of the Housatonic River there to fish. "I love the country life. I've had many opportunities to work in New York City, and I love it up here. We live in Danbury, really close to New Fairfield. We used to raise chickens. It’s a quieter life. I’m not a city person. I have a studio in my house. With a clear reference to Mr. Henderson, who owned several tractors, and his country pursuits, she said, "I understand that part of wanting to be in the country, even in the winter." The exhibition "Country Life: The Woods" runs through March 19 at The Silo Gallery at Hunt Hill Farm, which is located at 44 Upland Road in New Milford. The gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Monday. Admission is free. For more information, call 860-355-0300. |
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Pictures show here were scanned from the
newspaper and do not truly represent the quality of art. From top to
bottom:
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edge of a road: "Why shoot a ham? The cow is already dead." Country life has
its pleasures, although knowing that a ham comes from the hind leg of
certain animals, especially a hog, should not be largely rural information.
The protocol of a target shoot may be another story.
For
visual artists, especially, the woods have proved a fertile source, with a
slew of artists courting what Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, while
searching for a place in the country to paint, hailed in Gisors as "the
superb forests with extraordinarily irregular terrain."
Both
Ms. White and Mr. Chelminski have associations with Western Connecticut
State University, the Danbury-based institution that maintains a cultural
partnership with Hunt Hill Trust Farm Inc. Ms. White, for whom fine art and
illustration is a second career, is a recent alumnus, and Mr. Chelminski,
who has also been a resident at the MacDowell Colony of Art in New
Hampshire, has served on the faculty.