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Into the Harvested Field, 2009, oil on linen, Harry Orlyk
Artist Statement:
The year’s dark days begin with harvesting what the year’s bright days produce. After this, northern regions show the increasing effects of diminishing sunlight on open spaces. In the current winter, with paint on prepared linen surfaces, my neighbors’ lands are listened to like friends I have grown old with; those dearest to me are of how the light fell on the land at a given time, more about the sun than the clock.
The year’s phases shifts local color, when advancing through time. This, as much as the sun’s place in the sky, presents infinite variations, so even very familiar places can be exotic, occasionally made more so when the motif is occupied by people. Each evening this past autumn, workers left the potato harvest near the village of Salem, New York, giving themselves and their machines the night to rest. I painted the resting machines where they stood, in the light before darkness. Harvest Study is one of 25 paintings of this theme made during September and October, 2009.
Ten paintings of this harvest theme are included in the Bennington exhibit, along with another twenty focused on the fields at Salem’s edge, belonging to a series I call Many Ways into the Village.
Thirty five years of tracking this process, connecting open spaces to paint, has led me to the painter I have become.
Over the last five decades, Vermont has emerged as one of the epicenters of the crafts revival in America. However, the artistic, social, and economic history of the contemporary crafts movement in the Green Mountain State has previously not been comprehensively researched and presented in a major museum exhibition... until now.
State of Craft, the major exhibition of the Bennington Museum’s 2010 season, will feature more than 125 objects by 86 Vermont craftspeople, including master artists, emerging artists, and key individuals throughout the more than fifty year time frame of the studio craft movement, c. 1960-2010. This history will be told in a series of vignettes spread throughout the museum’s temporary exhibition galleries based on the themes that have emerged from curatorial research and oral history interviews conducted by the Vermont Folklife Center. In addition, the exhibition will include audio tours, historical photographs and documents, and text describing each artist’s role in the larger cultural and social history of the studio craft movement.
The major themes explored in the exhibition will be:
Over the past 50 years, Vermont has become one of the rural epicenters of the national studio craft movement as a result of an influx of young people who were drawn to the state during the 1960s and ‘70s back-to-the-land era. Beside examining the cultural roots of the early and successive generations of craftspeople, this theme will explore the challenge of sustaining an artistic career in a small rural state: how individuals have become professionals either through formal education, apprenticeship or other ways; if they focus on production work or one-of-a-kind art pieces and whether they work alone or with others; how technology has affected their work and how they market it; and if craft can sustain a new generation of artists.
Communities of craftspeople have developed throughout Vermont as creative individuals gravitated towards geographic regions for education, marketing reasons, or because of a strong artist culture. Recalling historic creative enclaves, the Weston Priory, where Brother Thomas Bezanson made his renowned ceramics, was established for religious reasons. Some clusters (such as Putney, Plainfield, Bradford) devolved from intentional communities formed during the counterculture movement. Connections have also formed within craft media (particularly glass) and guilds, or through organizational marketing efforts, teaching and international associations. Internet-based connections link a new generation of craftspeople to other artists as well as markets.
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The interplay between traditional craft and expressive craft and the multiplicity of artistic influences provide a framework for understanding the diverse nature of contemporary craft in Vermont. Some artists are directly inspired by Vermont’s pastoral and forested landscape but for others the landscape simply provides a quiet place of refuge that allows creativity to flourish. The effects of global and ethnic influences on aesthetics and design will also be highlighted as sources of inspiration. In addition, the role of values derived from the counterculture movement will be examined, particularly in how they manifest in the current trend towards environmental responsibility.
State of Craft will be the centerpiece of a year long statewide showcase of Vermont crafts coordinated by the Vermont Crafts Council, with many attendant exhibitions and related programming occurring throughout the Green Mountain State.
