SOUTH NEWFANE-Out on country roads from South Newfane to Brookline, artists and craftspeople use their hands to shape clay, paint, wood, fabric, even tea bags into one-of-a-kinds.
It’s what they do. Whatever the times, they keep creating, exploring, finding place and peace on the canvas, the workbench, the potter’s wheel.
So it is with the 11-member Rock River Artists (RRA), as the public can witness during the collective’s 33rd annual Open Studio Tour this Saturday and Sunday, July 18 and 19, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days.
For over three decades, the RRA tour has changed characters and routes, contracted and expanded, and continually grown a following among those who appreciate the human process of making art and craft — from raku pottery to painting, from thread-on-fabric images to upcycled, inlaid jewelry.
Following bright RRA signs, one can start in South Newfane at the historic Schoolhouse to pick up a map and see a sampling of each artist’s work.
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There, you’ll also meet Brittany Bills-Coleman, a rising artist who doesn’t yet have a studio to tour; instead, she creates steadily at an old oak table at home. Having shown mainly with the RRA and at other area events, this is her second year with the group.
Smitten with nature, landscapes, and the charm of everyday things, Bills-Coleman uses a mix of materials from pressed flowers to acrylics on tea bags and on handmade paper.
Some of her depictions are set within multi-portaled frames, others in funky finds of various sizes.
Some in miniature frames were inspired by Brattleboro Festival of Miniatures co-Founder Melany Kahn, for whose festival centerpiece dollhouse Bills-Coleman donated a miniature last December.
Bills-Coleman’s attention to detail is precise and serves her subjects and palette well in renderings of birds, flora, mountains, and commonplace animals. Each has a homespun feeling, an attractive innocence. She’ll be at the Schoolhouse each tour day to talk with visitors about her work.
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From the Schoolhouse heading west on Auger Hole Road, you’ll find seasoned and popular raku pottery artist, Richard Foye, who’s been with the RRA since its beginning.
Raku is a low-firing process that involves “removing pottery from the kiln while at bright red heat and placing it into containers with combustible materials,” according to thesprucecrafts.com.
In two rustic spaces spattered with ephemera, Foye keeps at it — trying new shapes and sizes and even mugs with handles. He likes to introduce a new glaze now and then. This year’s is lemony, bright, and comforting, especially with the crackle of raku firing.
Having recently had a show at his alma mater, the Putney School, Foye still shows at the League of NH Craftsmen’s Fair in Sunapee, New Hampshire.
Checking in with Foye at his studio, The Commons learned more about his influences, especially about British studio potter and art educator Bernard Leach’s bringing from Japan to the West the art of raku.
And just down the road from Foye, find Chris Darrow at Olallie Daylily Farms. Having lived in South Newfane for over 50 years, Darrow has spent most of his time there nurturing an expansive display of many-colored lilies preparing each of dozens of varieties for sale.
He denies he’s an artist in that realm; he’s merely a facilitator, he says. Lately, inspired by the natural world, by archaic and archeological art, and by his mother, the late Ellen Darrow (Aho) a lifelong artist, Darrow has been exploring expression in craft and experimenting with materials and methods that call him.
“I find the patterns, shapes and natural rhythm of items like shells, seed pods, flowers, [and] fossils particularly compelling and inspiring. As for the archeological and archaic aspect, I have always been struck by the childlike simplicity and yet deeply artistic appearance of ancient art.”
In his basement studio that doubles as Olallie’s office, Darrow allows a spontaneous and unpredictable approach that lately has included working with setting images on tiles — some of them his mother’s drawing — and firing them in various ways with a range of glazes.
He makes myriad coins, too, using different stamps on clay which will be available on the tour. They appeal especially to kids, he says, being handmade: As if on an “archaeological dig,” they yield a “connectedness to something that’s real and not on a screen.”
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Heading east toward Williamsville on Dover Road, you can turn on to Baker Brook to catch up with Deidre Scherer, who has pioneered the figurative potential of both thread-on-layered-fabric and woven paper constructions.
Seen recently in an episode of Here We Are on Brattleboro Community Television, Scherer is represented by Mitchell-Giddings Gallery in Brattleboro. Her work has been seen in museums, exhibitions, and galleries around the U.S., in various books and magazines, and even on film.
Much of Scherer’s work reflects aging and end-of-life moments and has been sought for inclusion in works on such subjects. Another “exciting [development] was when a woman out of Australia was giving a talk in Singapore on hospice” in which she used several images of Scherer’s work to punctuate her presentation.
Working in her attic studio on a disciplined schedule amidst works in progress, fabric pieces taken from meticulously arranged stacks, threads, and a trusty sewing machine, Scherer depicts both still life and a range of figures — mainly elderly — in exquisitely arranged selections of calicos and colors.
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T. Breeze Verdant’s studio is full of micro drill presses, large equipment, trays of works in progress, and an odd assortment of materials, all used to create delicately inlaid earrings and pendants.
“I continue to play with beer cans I find on the side of the road,” he says, in his ongoing quest for new materials to upcycle. “I post on Front Porch Forum, ‘I’m looking for copper strand wire,’ and I find myself down at my friend Barry’s house, where he loves to hold on to car parts. He’s got a whole bucket of all these battery cables, these fine copper strands that look like comet tailings.”
Verdant has “a lot of fun playing with these different metals — fine strands of extension cords to heavier speaker wires.”
“I’m chopping them up into little pieces and just gluing them into holes to see how they come out,” he says. “It’s a pretty beautiful medium — these brass, copper, nickel wires against the black background of recycled ebony piano keys along with abalone and mother of pearl. There’s just no end to what you can do.”
About his designs, Verdant says, “people do like the mountains, sky, water,” depicted in much of his work, but he’s also inclined toward more abstraction.
“I just worship the beauty of the earth and sky — anything that hints in that direction,” he says.
Just think, he adds, “of a magic moment when you were standing there and a comet goes by. You weren’t expecting it, and all of a sudden there’s this blazing flame in the sky.”
That “magic” is what Verdant aims to capture.
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Before you leave this area, head up Sunset Lake Road to North Pond Road, where you can catch potter Matthew Tell in a well-organized and spacious studio with a wood kiln in its designated building out back. Downstairs and up, the eye feasts on a range of glazes, shapes, tried-and-true works, and newer ventures.
Like Foye, Tell has scaled his travels back to just the Sunapee fair, but his studio has still been buzzing with, among other activities, a 10-person, two-day workshop in wood firing in which five “what I’ll call kids from New York City” took part.
“They were just soaking it up, and that was exciting,” because, he says, with digital fabrication and the expense of schooling, there are fewer and fewer young people plying crafts.
For example, he adds that “Sunapee used to just allow people from New Hampshire and within 10 miles of the border in, and now they accept guests” from farther reaches.
Tell plans more such workshops, which he posts online — surprising himself, as he is one who once thought he’d never be on a computer much.
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Travel toward Newfane on Route 30 and turn on Bruce Brook Road, where you’ll find Gayle Robertson’s studio — airy and full of sunlight.
Over each of the last few winters, Robertson says, she has chosen a subject, “and just worked with that all winter,” using that practice as a way to explore color, value, form, shape.
She finds the challenge “a good practice for the winter, although it does make me kind of crazy by the end.”
“It’s always interesting to look at several of one thing, you know?” she says. “That’s what [Andy] Warhol was all about in so many ways, and so many artists do that over and over again, because we don’t see things the same from day to day. We’re different people, we’re a little different after each painting, each conversation.”
Such was seen in a recent exhibition at Brattleboro’s 118 Elliot, which Robertson curated, and it was also in works that treat the same simple still life through different lenses, each in engaging colors, each different from the last.
Robertson has also been exploring more large-scale formats, meeting a challenge to make something with materials she’d never used before. That has led to her displaying two-sided pieces hung and anchored to the floor of her studio.
There, she works on both sides in a more sculptural approach “building up color” and “creating forms, creating space, and then there’s light,” which she uses to striking effect, not surprisingly given her background in lighting design.
Robertson enjoys doing the open studios, especially seeing an artist who is really at work.
“You walk into a space and see what their process is like,” she says. “That makes it real.”
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Leaving Bruce Brook Road just a short distance up Route 30, you’ll find new RRA member Ed Jekot at his Gallery 1330. The director of marketing at Mary Meyer in Townshend, Jekot came to Vermont after listening to a podcast featuring an old friend and fellow Rhode Island School of Design alum, Adrianna Alty, with historian and writer, Jill Lepore.
As noted on rockriverartists.com, Jekot’s paintings “explore ideas of science, humor, space, and narrative, often looking at the relationship between people, pattern, and environment. Working across different materials and processes, he investigates how space is experienced and understood. While each series develops its own visual language, recurring formal elements connect the work throughout his practice.”
Of late, Jekot says he’s done “a lot of sculpture and exploring more encaustic with wax, playing with that — with gray-and-white underpaint and then the oil paint on top,” all particularly effective in his depictions of animals that blend whimsical and ethereal.
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Gianna Robinson is up Route 30 a few miles past Newfane Village in a charming free-standing studio in which the painter’s work is seen in its several stages — works in acrylics, alcohol ink, water color, and oil.
What draws her to paint, she notes on rockriverartists.com, “is the same feeling I get walking in the woods, kayaking on an open pond, or snowshoeing up a hill. It is calming, meditative, and embracing.”
Painting, she writes, “keeps me connected to myself and to the grounding that nature gifts me. It helps me feel truly grateful for my senses and emotions, in addition to helping boost my mental and physical health.”
Robinson has been keeping journals, several sketchbooks filled with drawings, paintings, experiments, and whimsies. Flipping through them, one gets a good sense of how her art evolves as a reflection of her passages in life and nature.
“I revel in how art embodying the natural world can bring transcendent memories indoors,” her artist’s statement explains.
After she hung her work at Brattleboro’s Mocha Joe’s recently, “I had a lot of great feedback,” Robinson recalls.
In addition to preparing for the RRA tour she’s soon to be focused on a September show at Newfane’s Crowell Gallery with her mother, Deidre Scherer, and her sister, artist Corina Willette, a member of the art faculty of SUNY New Paltz.
The show will also feature works by Robinson’s grandfather, Fred F. Scherer, who painted dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and her step-grandmother, Cicely Aikman, a painter of renown.
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Travel back down Route 30 and turn left toward Brookline, and soon after the green iron bridge, you’ll find Noelle VanHendrick and Eric Hendrick’s studio, ZPOTS, new to the RRA tour.
According to a recent RRA press release, “in a busy, multi-annexed, yet moderately-sized studio, the couple and a few others produce work to be marketed as the 25-year-old ZPOTS through 100 galleries across 50 states and abroad. They’re regulars, too, at both trade and retail shows up and down the East Coast.”
Looking at shelf upon shelf of inscribed pieces, one finds pithy sentiments and inspiration, all of VanHendrick’s making, from simply “joy,” “hope,” and “abundance” to “bee the change.”
“A lot of folks don’t recognize or realize that it’s all hand inscribed,” says VanHendrick. “They think it’s like a decal, but everything is hand done” — all the stars and hearts and words and expressions of inspiration.
As noted on rockriverartists.com, “Noelle VanHendrick’s artistic vision is intuitive, atmospheric, and deeply expressive. Her work is guided by a love of beauty, storytelling, and emotional resonance, often exploring the intersection of art, music, intimacy, and everyday ritual. She brings a raw, soulful sensibility to the studio’s creative direction, shaping collections that feel both timeless and alive.”
Being part of the RRA community, she says, helps fulfill ZPOTS mission: “We’re happy — and really excited — to be a part of this community of artists.”
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Just a jog farther on Grassy Brook Road, take a left on Hill Road and up there find Nancy Libby’s studio overlooking a spacious pasture with hills beyond.
In the RRA press release, Libby, new to the collective, says she’s been painting since high school.
“Basically, art, English, and sports were my three things. I didn’t do well in math,” she says — and, ironically, she worked in software development for 30 years.
“I’ve always had a little studio, a place to do art,” Libby says. “I knew when I retired, it was going to be my full-time gig.” And so it is. She’s had recent shows in Dover and in Newfane and is happy to be gearing up for the RRA tour.
Working in acrylics with some mixed media, she’s moved and inspired “by what’s around me,” she says, pointing out the picture window from within her studio’s bright white walls.
“I spend a lot of time in the woods with my dog, walking and hiking,” Libby says. “So really just clearing my mind and letting go when I’m in this space. I’m always working on more than one thing at a time.”
That way, she explains, “I can get my color palette right. I go through these phases where I do more mellow colors, but right now I’m working bright.”
Of the RRA, she adds, “it’s inspiring to hang out with them. I mean, just to talk about life — it doesn’t even have to be about art, right? But just creative minds together.”
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Visitors are encouraged to pick up a map and start their Rock River Artists tour at the historic South Newfane Schoolhouse, 390 Dover Rd. For more information on this free event and for photos of artists’ work, visit rockriverartists.com.
Annie Landenberger is an arts writer and columnist for The Commons. Her partner is T. Breeze Verdant, one of the artists interviewed in this column.
This Arts column by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.