Great Barrington — My Berkshire summers are full of many pleasures but a central one for me is participating in the Housatonic Valley Art League summer shows, now mounted in the middle of Great Barrington at the former Searles High School gymnasium across from the Co-op Market on Bridge Street.
Through June I’m busy thinking: which two paintings will I put into the first show (now over) and then the second one, currently just beginning (July 22 to August 16). And what about the third more expansive show of panels, called Artists Choice (Aug 17 through Sept 7)? How many panels can I fill and with what? I ponder: this painting is too wild to be likely to sell, breaks with “normal” ways of using paint, but I really like it.
Gillian sat in my garden last fall doing one of her lovely pastels and I found myself painting not the landscape but Gillian working in the landscape. I was trying my best not to be as realistic as possible but rather to convey the joyful abundance of flower and leaf. And I’m after a kind of roughness of emotion, not refinement of detail. I do one version while we are together, and it feels too tight to me, I can’t bear its neatness, so I do a second one on my own, from memory and feeling, a riff on the first, and find that I like it so much better, even though my husband, who is a knowledgeable judge and advisor on these matters, tells me to submit the first one, that others would find it more acceptable. Is the one that I like too garish? Even a little bizarre? Do I care? I feel it equals the beautiful energy, the brilliance, of what that wondrous landscape of my little back yard, with Kerner Brook running through it, feels like to me.
And that blue painting I had in the first show, of the women poets group I write with, we who are old and artists and talk about it. I think of a poster I once nabbed in Vermont announcing some event with Grace Paley, because I was so enamored of its heading in large letters, “In and Out of the World.” (It now resides on my bulletin board).
It’s that sense I was trying to get by images of something there and not there. The hummingbirds in the picture and in the picture’s title, who in fact flit in great numbers around feeders outside Sondra’s screened porch where we write and read our work to one another, I included as a metaphor for the sometimes/mostly sweet harvest of our enterprise. So much time and hard work went into that painting, and so much feeling, it was impossible to charge a low price, but I really liked it so I wanted it up and out there, in the world. And the League makes it possible.
I have also taken to a kind of self-portraiture recently — again not seeking a recognizable resemblance so much as a flash of something I see in the mirror or in myself. Or maybe just liking the way the colors combime or the shape of an eye, a mouth. So in each of the first two shows of this season I have submitted these small studies of heads, and hope to do some more.
Before submitting the work, I fuss over little painting imperfections I see at the last minute. I consider frames and I fix backings. We all queue up on the designated day to offer up the results of our labors (about 50 of us for this current show of over a hundred paintings), chatting with old comrades and encountering new ones, since the League is open to anyone who wants to join and new members keep coming along. HVAL represents people who have painted for a few years and those who have painted for a lifetime, and I like that about it.
Painting in the Berkshires profoundly changed my life. I’d drawn and painted a lot as a child, and again on my own while I was starting out teaching college English in New York, but demands of family and profession soon crowded all that out, though I always thought of it as my first love.
Decades later, right after we bought our house up here in the ‘80s, Margot Trout — who had just moved here herself —
began teaching an outdoor painting class. We accidentally ran into her, and she invited me to join — my first art class, in my 50s. And this time around, there was no turning back. Painting every summer in Margo’s remarkable class and between classes going out into the fields and up into the mountains with my painting buddies, and with canvasses, easels, paints, palettes, in tow. Then retiring, hesitantly (because I liked teaching literature and film and women’s studies), only to find myself at the Art Students League and soon fully embarked on being a painter. And finally joining the oldest art group in this area, then called the Sheffield Art League (before it became HVAL 10 years ago) and for all the years since, showing every summer at the members show and the Juried Show that followed it at Dewey Hall in Sheffield. And even though I have also shown my work in larger quantities in other venues, from the Academy Building in Salisbury (Connecticut) to the Welles Gallery in Lenox, to the Becket Art Center to other places, the steady affiliation that measures out my summers to this day remains the HVAL summer shows.
Mostly, HVAL shows work of high quality, and splendid skill, at shockingly low prices. I know of nothing comparable, in New York or anywhere else I have been — art this good and this cheap. Many of the paintings are in the $150 to $400 range, gorgeous images, beautifully framed. There are bins in addition to the work hung on the walls, and these have fine watercolors and oils for as little as $50 and $75.
And there’s an astonishing variety of mediums, subjects, styles: watercolors, oils, pastels, acrylic, collage; nature scenes from this area — Wayne Jenkins’ beautiful wintry DelMolino’s farm, Pat Hogan’s fresh and delicate snowy woods (which won Honorable Mention), Andrea Scott’s lovely watercolor of Mt. Everett road, Tina Chandler‘s rich uphill pastel Diablo Road, with an array of colors — light yellow, greens, blues, pinks and red — perfectly balanced and believable, that received Honorable Mention. There are terrific still lifes, like Antonella Preve’s layer cake, cupcake, champagne (called “Celebration”), and her healthier but equally well done second piece of an assortment of veggies. There’s a marvellous subtle muted city view by Hans Heuberger, of New York’s East River, also an award winner, and Walter Bogad’s terrific image of Railroad Street’s Church Avenue Trading Co. with an interesting play of reflections, that got an Award of Excellence.
There are intriguing abstractions like the one by Roselle Chartock, and interesting figure paintings like Harvey Kimmelman’s of a banged up prize fighter, which garnered first prize; Violet Wilcox’s delicately rendered potter, and Lois van Cleef’s musicians — and all of these (and many more) in their own totally varied distinctive styles.
Last autumn Walter Bogad and I kept going back up Mt Everett to Guilder Pond, to paint in the peace and beauty of that place. People looked at us with interest from their cars en route to parking above, but kept a respectful distance and allowed us our total immersion in our work, which sometimes feels like a form of meditation, at least the only one I know.
Walter came away with exquisitely detailed colored-pencil images as careful and painstaking as his decades of working as a New York dentist must have been, and yet lyrical somehow at the same time.
But meticulousness is not my aesthetic, I try for rawness and boldly expressive color and intensity, and I came away with paintings that couldn’t have been more different from his, and that sometimes feel very different from the whole group show. But that’s all right with me: some sell, some really like what I do, and some I imagine (though they would never say so) think I’m not much of a painter because what they are striving for is so different. But there’s room for all of us in this group.
Members not only produce all this art but run the complex machinery that allows the shows, and HVAL’s other activities, to happen. Hans Heuberger rigs up the all-important lighting in a venue that was generously given as a gift to the group for this summer’s shows by Iredale Mineral Cosmetics, but it required Hans’ hard work and skill as a lifetime engineer to make it viable as a showplace, as he has often saved the day for us over many years.
Harvey Kimmelman, Walter Bogad, Tina Chandler — I can’t begin to mention all the other so hardworking members and how they give valiantly of their time and energy to keep this precious enterprise going. And along with such large responsibilities, there are the small ones like gallery sitting, that we all take turns doing during a show. While I sat there for my three hours during this last show, I was struck not only by how many people came by, but by how slowly they moved, how they looked with such care at each work. They could have been at MOMA or the Met. I don’t think it’s attention misspent. Many of us put our hearts and long years of preparation — one way or another — into this work, and it’s heartening that, purchases or not, those who look at it bring to it this kind of seriousness and take this kind of pleasure in what they see. I think HVAL is an adornment to our area, and it has certainly been an adornment to my own life.
Reception for the current show is on Friday, July 24, 5-7:30 p.m. All are welcome. The last opening reception for the last show of the year will be on Friday August 21, 5 to 7:30 p.m.
