Archive for February, 2009

FEBRUARY BLOG

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

Dear VSC Friends,

Here’s the 2nd posting of the VSC Founder’s focus blog, which, in honor of the Studio Center’s 25th Anniversary, we’ll be sending out on the 25th of each month, or thereabouts i.e. “close enough for rock n’ roll.”

I had visions of expanding the  mostly photo format of the first posting, with interesting/inspiring text…but maybe next time…it’s been extremely busy here in Johnson…we’ve just  received over 900 Residency applications for our February 17th deadline (one of 4 each year) which is the highest number we’ve received for one deadline in 25 years…and that flow along with a steady flow of new patrons supporting new Fellowships ** makes us feel we’re living in a utopian bubble currently shielding VSC from global financial turmoil, and individual economic hardship, which regretfully besets so many.  We keep waiting for the other shoe to drop…but are all working assiduously to try to insure that it doesn’t.

Meanwhile,  we welcome the opportunity to host artists and writers in Johnson, providing them with the time and space to charge up their creative batteries, get a break from  daily stresses at home, and through their time in a VSC studio, deepen their work; and through their time in the VSC community, deepen their compassion, and open their hearts to people and problems around the world.

You can check out profiles of some of these artists on our 25th anniversary website.

Happy New Year (today is Losar, the Tibetan New Year 2136).

Jon Gregg

Founder

** I’m in New York once a month for 3 – 4 days meeting current and potential VSC supporters and introducing the latter to the Studio Center, so if there’s anyone you feel I should meet, please let me know at jgregg@vermontstudiocenter.org.

 

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt,
and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

~Leonardo da Vinci

What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.

~John Updike

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Residents

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

February Residents:

Photo by Howard Romero

February International Residents:

Photo by Howard Romero

Aimee Brown, Canada

James Olley, Canada

Janice Wu, Canada

Primrose Coke, England

Anna Mioni, Italy

 Sonja Bendel, Germany

Victoria Paskett, England

Chaiwat Kudapun, Thailand

Meabh Mattimoe, Ireland

Made Arya Dedok, Bali
Resident Portraits:

VSC Staff Photographer Howard Romero is working on a series of black and white portraits of each month’s Residents in their studios.  Here are a few of them:

Photos by Howard Romero

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Visiting Artists and Writers

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

February Visiting Artists:

Ellen Altfest

Amy Yoes

James Clark

Dan Rizzie

February Visiting Writers:

Excerpt from Change of Life
By Cleopatra Mathis

 

 

 

Dread wakes me and so, yes,
I welcome the white, ruled as I am
by the body. In monochrome, in stasis,
the part that wants to be dead
is one with the bloodless snow. These months
have piled up, the drifts rise higher
than the windows, the layers
make a readable strata. Six inches of powder
over the rotten sleety stuff from February’s
brief thaw, and under that, a packed twelve inches.
I too take on an aspect of knowing.
But outside the body’s chart, tell me,
is the self knowable, with limited but mutable
variations, finally an understanding
at the bottom of it all?

Among the withheld trees, the snow
has taken on the aspect of a tunnel
and as I walk, the past closes. Behind me,
the house I loved, its animals and children.
But this cold wants nothing of regret.
When I wake, it’s no waking
to the redeemable blue of sky, the new markings
on bark and limb– only the pale light,
a calm caught in translucence,
a world under glass.

Excerpt from Shhh
By Michael Waters:

 

 

 

The language that remains unspoken, often
for years, till the shuddering rhythm of the Accord

helps to shape a stanza you revise aloud
in splendid isolation, becomes another version of goodbye

still less eloquent than Miles’ muted “Shhh” on FM
& arriving much too late to make leaving easier for either.

“If I love you,” wrote Goethe, “what business is it of yours?”
So the spondees that propel your dented shell this evening

begin to dissipate in the never-imagined future-without-her
like gasoline fumes floating from your fingers,

while those smoky solos––how she clasped you within her!––
resonate like the muffled clamor of orgasm, chords

blown beyond improvisation, beyond prosody, till
you surrender destination, your stress-laden vocabulary,

to the tires’ susurration on the sodden leaves, & the slow,
unbroken seeping-upward of the combo.

Shhh.

March Visiting Artists and Writers:

David Gates

Tom Bills

Julian Lethbridge

Lauren Ewing

Majorie Portnow

Charles Bock

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Snow Stamp

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

December 2009 VSC Fellow Sun Hee Kim, a sculptor from Korea, created a wooden stamp of her name which she used to mark the snow around Johnson while as a resident at VSC.
 

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House Frame, 2009

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Sculptor Sarah Fitzsimons, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellow in January 2009, made this video of her installation ‘House Frame, 2009′ while as a resident at VSC.

[youtube 0l9sn1Ywzy4]

 

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