The Cedar Tree at Barrow Vineyard

Christmas Eve at dusk, above cold Seneca Lake waters, I walk with my husband across Barrow Vineyard to a cedar tree.  When we established Barrow Vineyard, we left this tree to grow with the Riesling vines in row 17 as a symbol.  Here, as is our ritual, we drink a toast to our ancestors by lifting a glass, filled with our own Barrow Vineyard Riesling, and hang a wooden toy on a cedar bough to blow in the wind. It’s dark when we leave and all is quiet except for the muffled sound of heavy winter boots making tracks in the snow.

Reverence for continuity is inherent in the very act of establishing a vineyard. Each harvest is an homage to all that has gone before and all that follows.  As a winegrower, my passion is to forge an intimate connection to the vineyard, to reveal its hidden poetry.  On Christmas Eve, Kim and I rejoice as we toast to the many and varied vintages that will come from vines planted on a steep hillside above Seneca Lake – from our own Barrow Vineyard -  long after we are gone.

A Small Indigo Place

I was shipwrecked on an island of clouds. The sun’s pillars bored me though, so I set foot on a small indigo place… from “The Map” by Adam Fitzgerald

     Kim’s passion in life is to till the earth and watch things grow. With scholarly dedication, he studies the nuances of sun, rain, and wind on his vines. He pays attention to every bird nesting in and around the vineyard and to the gulls and grackles that follow him in the field as he plows.  In the barrel, he notes nuances of flavor in wine made from grapes planted where raspberries once grew and flavors from vines planted in hillside shale.  It was not a hard choice for me to marry a poet.  I was happy to live in an old farmhouse by a creek.  Looking back now, I see that - in a sense - I had chosen to become shipwrecked on an island of clouds. In addition, as foreshadowed in “The Map” by Adam Fitzgerald, when I pulled myself away from the mainstream contemporary art world, I would set foot on a small indigo place. This may explain my preference for a palette of cool blues and greys.

Tired of Captivity

   Tired of captivity, we escaped through a secret passage.  That night, hidden in tall rushes by the river, a thousand small creatures discussed bygone times. We lay on our backs, looking at the stars, listening.

    In winter I feed the birds.  Finches, sparrows, jays make cheery chatter as I watch from the window.  I’ve learned all their names by now, living on this rural road for over thirty years.  At first, books told me the difference between finches – House and Purple.  Now I just know.  I also know the names of rare visitors to the feeder like Redpolls or Brown Creepers.

     In January, Kim’s friend Bruno came for a visit to our small house on Vineyard Road.  Kim and Bruno had been out of touch for over thirty years following a friendship forged in their college dormitory.  They had made the effort to attend each other's wedding, which took place just six months apart but also worlds apart.  After that, life intervened and Kim and Bruno had gone their separate ways. Recently, Bruno had reappeared. He arrived, unannounced, one afternoon at our winery tasting-room and now Bruno and Kim were friends again.

     While we prepared dinner in a cozy kitchen, snow squalls, in a white fury, tore across corn fields below our house. Outside, the temperature was minus six.  Inside, we were dining by candlelight, drinking a bottle of our own wine – Cabernet Franc 2013 – and eating Bruno’s Pasta Bolognese.

     During the meal I found myself recalling a story about waiting in line at a store register behind a young boy with a crippled leg. His farm clothes were neatly washed and mended and when it was his turn at the register, he counted out rolls of coins, pulled from deep in his pockets, to pay for one small bag of birdseed.  As I watched, I had thought of Tiny Tim in Charles Dicken’s – A Christmas Carol. There, in front of me, stood Tiny Tim with rolls of coins and a small bag of birdseed proclaiming – God bless us, everyone!

     In describing this to Bruno,  I think I was trying to explain choices Kim and I have made.  I suppose, unwittingly, Bruno had played a part in these decisions when, long ago, he took Kim with him to Dambel, Italy when they were young.

Herb and Dorothy Vogel - "The Proletarian Art Collectors"

  Over time, seemingly unimportant events begin to take on a greater significance. Kim and I now know this to be true. After 40 years of taking one step at a time, there is now a vineyard and winery called Bloomer Creek. When we were young, our desire to live as artist and vigneron brought us to the Finger Lakes where we planted vines and built trellis to establish our vineyard. While we worked, we also forged an intimate connection to Bloomer Creek and its hidden poetry.

    In my early years at Midtown Payson Galleries in NYC, I often heard stories of the famous art collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel. The Vogel’s collection was considered at the time to be the most important post 1960’s art collection in the country. At all glamorous museum and gallery openings, Dorothy and Herbert held sway. Apart from fame as collectors, Dorothy and Herbert Vogel were celebrities because they had put together their prized collection while living on modest incomes as Brooklyn librarian and postal clerk, respectively. The “Proletarian Art Collectors” were unique in the chic world of Manhattan high society because they collected art not for showmanship or tax write-off, but out of passion. For five decades the Vogels chose to live simply - living in a one bedroom apartment, never dining out, never traveling. They chose this because it allowed them to buy art on their limited budget. They frequented galleries and museums and enthusiastically made friends with young, undiscovered artists. When they found artwork they wanted to buy, a payment schedule was arranged, sometimes as little as $10 per month.  Their criterion for purchase was that they both liked the work and could carry it home. Eventually established artists discounted their artwork for the Vogels in order to be included in the august "Vogel" collection. Perhaps the most compelling part of this story is the fact that Dorothy and Herbert were never willing to sell parts of their collection to become rich. “We were never interested about that aspect” Herbert is quoted as saying.

     Along with their art collection – large enough to require five trucks to move to Washington DC when it was eventually donated to the National Gallery - the Vogels managed to fit eight cats and 20 exotic turtles into their cramped apartment. Tall visitors (the Vogels were both small - around 5 feet) reported hitting their heads on artwork suspended from the ceiling. People who choose to live this way tend to be considered eccentric at best, and if the artwork they collected had not been so valuable, neighbors might have been inclined to call them “hoarders.”  In 1992 Dorothy Vogel told the NYTimes – “We didn’t set out to live bizarrely.”

    At what point in life can one say that? How many cats does it take to transform someone from being a “cat person” into someone who lives “bizarrely”? Perhaps it was the combination of living with cats, turtles AND famous artwork that was the qualifier for use of the word “bizarre”.  Implicit in this question is the necessity to consider events over a period of time, as in - over a period of time the Vogels’ art collection became famous. The Vogels bought their first piece of art to celebrate their wedding.  A year later they bought another piece for their anniversary, then - a birthday; a holiday; “just because” - so it went for five decades. Each individual purchase, made over a period of time, eventually turned into a “collection”.

     The creation of Bloomer Creek Vineyard evolved in a similar way. The choices made over time – like our willingness to live in an abandoned shack without plumbing or electricity in order to finance a future vineyard – brought us to where we are today. Like Herbert and Dorothy, every choice we made came from our passion to live as artist and vigneron in the verdant countryside of the Finger Lakes region we now call home.

Wandering in the Woods

    Dicky and I were inseparable companions, running as Hawkeye and Swampfox on wooded paths in our neighborhood and also on remote paths in the Adirondacks where Dicky’s grandfather P.G. lived. We dug forts, caught snakes, flew kites, skated and skied. We fished, sailed, climbed trees and played catch. We dressed as bank robbers and hobos for Halloween and delivered newspapers on our bikes.

     Once, while wandering in woods far from home, we found an abandoned trolley car gutted by fire. Thick black soot covered a small table and two over-turned chairs. Scarred kitchen utensils littered the floor next to a book with pages singed like a pirate’s map. Small saplings had begun to grow in the chaos.  Our discovery seemed both exotic and slightly dangerous, heightened by the fact that to get there, we had to pass the Audie’s house – the house of known eccentrics. Set back from the road on a small rise, the dark overgrown house looked like it belonged to a witch. It was stucco with Tudor styling on doors and windows. Even more menacing was the fact that the Audie family was rarely seen.  That night, while making our way back to our new “fort”, we spied on them from a perch in the woods. Though we couldn’t see clearly, what we could see looked like junk piled from floor to ceiling everywhere and the movement of shadowy figures. After seeing this, our abandoned trolley car “fort” was soon forgotten.

A Ghostly Apparition

     Ten years later I lived with Kim in rural upstate New York where tractors drove on the road by our farmhouse as often as cars. We had chickens and goats and tended a large vegetable garden, bright with zinnias and sunflowers the color of crayons. On Halloween we carved the biggest pumpkin from our patch and roasted the culled seeds to salt and have with homemade beer.  We walked in the woods behind our house and across long, windswept fields.  As we made our way up and down leaf-littered ravines, we told tall tales and staged elaborate regattas in creeks with boats made of leaves and sticks. Often, in our wandering, we started owls from daytime roosts. Later, at the farmhouse, we checked our Field Guide to Birds and debated whether it was a Barred or Short-Eared Owl we had seen. Kim preferred to stick to the facts while I was inclined to suggest more exotic sightings, like the Subarctic Form of the Great Horned Owl. These debates could last well into the evening. Similar debates continue to this day.

      Once, in late spring, we saw what seemed to be a small apparition in the middle of a thicket. Flickering sunlight danced across the ghostly presence, illuminating its form against dark brush. Tall trees creaked in the wind.  As we moved closer, the erect form remained still. We could see the “ghost” looking at us, staring from its isolated perch - a fledgling Turkey Vulture whose “naked” head appeared white in dappled sunlight. Not wanting to disturb the young bird in this quiet spot, we soon left. Later that summer, we found the body of a young vulture caught in the tangled brush of a wild rose.  The bird had been unable to escape the rose thorns and died, caught with its young wings outstretched.  Perhaps we had seen an “apparition” in the woods after all.

At the Top of the Stairs...

   At the top of the stairs a door opened to my studio. Tall windows flooded the dark loft with light. A freshening breeze blew through open windows, scattering drawings across the studio floor like dry leaves. Once, a Golden Crowned Kinglet, a tiny bird no bigger than a plum, appeared when I opened the door. To help it escape, I cupped it in my hand upside-down. Held this way, the Kinglet was calm and stared at me with quiet reserve, its body in my hand as light as air.  A skullcap of black, yellow and red adorned the head of the olive-grey bird, its namesake “Golden-Crown.” What luck to hold something so small and fragile before it disappears – like tracing hoarfrost “lace” at dawn on a windowpane in winter.

     Looking at the Kinglet’s tiny, bright eyes in my hand, taught me a lesson. When I saw Goya’s Still Life with Golden Bream, a painting of a pile of dead fish on a table, the eyes of the Golden Bream were not bright like the Kinglet’s, but dull and glazed. There was a difference between the eyes of a dead fish and a live bird and it could be painted.

Paul Cadmus

     Chris and Bridget’s wedding was held on a hot summer evening at the Salmugundi Club in Gramercy Park NYC.  It was a festive affair, filled with delightful things to eat and drink. Queueing for champagne, I noticed that the bar was particularly striking - made of dark, glossy wood embellished with elaborate scrolls of ivory inlay.  Heavy lanterns hung from a low ceiling. The tone was dark, intimate, and exotic. Soon, I began to feel the excitement of being somewhere far, far away - surrounded by kings, genies, sorcerers and beggarmen.

       Two dashing gentlemen seated near the bar caught my attention. The older man, with regal bearing, wore a corn-blue suit with a bright, white shirt matching his long, white hair. Though, truly, I can’t remember - I would guess his tie was yellow, since I know, now, how this man liked to dress classically, yet with bold “accents.”  At the time, my attention was focused on his eyes because they were so extraordinarily blue. His demeanor was touched with a scholarly aspect, in stark contrast to his deeply tanned face. To his right sat a small, almost petite man. His suit was stylish and tight, the color of midnight. Puckish gold curls fell loosely around his neck. Like watching Vaslov Nijinsky dance in Stravinsky’s ballet, The Rite of Spring, he exuded passion laced wildness, though just a touch. I watched as “Nijinsky” pushed his chair backward from the table and balance it on two legs. He then closed his eyes and smiled, faintly nodding his head back and forth in time to the music.

     Crowds of people came to their table. They seemed to know everyone and smiling broadly, they extended their hands in greeting with calm beneficence. I wanted to extend my hand to them as well, but was too shy at the time.  Fortunately, we met again later at Midtown Galleries. After being formally introduced, it became clear why these two “dashing” men had captivated me. The gentleman in the corn-blue suit with beautiful, white hair was the renowned artist and “man of letters,” Paul Cadmus. “Nijinsky” was his muse and long-time companion, Jon Anderson.  For the next ten years I pursued my art career in NYC with Paul Cadmus as my mentor and friend until he died. At times, with shades of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, I felt like a young girl caught “in mysterious games, walking in circles.” My friendship with Paul helped chart a true course through it all.

Falling Off a Log

   A decade of life spent adventuring is what I left behind when I came to live with Kim in the Finger Lakes. At a frantic pace – belayed with an ice axe – I had crossed glaciers and climbed peaks, including majestic Mt. Rainier at 14,400 feet in the Northern Cascades. I had skied and camped for days in the wilderness along frozen rivers, retrieved spinnaker poles from masts in gale winds, followed giant squid in deep, warm Caribbean waters. For the past ten years I had done everything I could to ignore the fact that I felt trapped in a marriage to the wrong person.

     With youthful bravado, a young male “companion” and I had left our courses at Bowdoin College for a shack on a beach in Nantucket. In the summer we painted houses and in winter we worked on scallop boats in the bay. They were halcyon days spent surfcasting for bluefish and seabass that we roasted at night on bonfires built in the sand. We drank tankards of beer and sang sea shanties in old seaport saloons. I taught myself to play the harmonica. At night, lying on our backs, our heads cradled in cold dunes, we studied the stars.  We needed to learn the constellations so we could navigate our ship when we sailed around the world.

    How easy, when young, to fall off a log or marry on a foolish whim. How painful to realize, years later, you made a mistake. Where once all you needed was a beach and stars at night, now there were lawyers and claims to property – who would take the dog?  So many nights of dreaming and doubt – of being lost in an old hotel, going from room to room, opening doors and trying to escape on legs that could not or would not move.

With the Passage of Time

      For many years, during the time when Kim and I began Bloomer Creek Vineyard, I made studio paintings in the quiet north light of my studio on Vineyard Road.  A Court for Owls led to many other small, intimate still life paintings. It was never my aim to achieve literal responses to my personal iconography – the odd assortment of balls, boxes and bits of string that I painted. Rather, it was my goal to solicit responses that were intuitive and emotional.  Cool, filtered light emanated from these paintings.  My minimalist palette, which suggested gun metal, with a little of the lustre of old coins and tarnished silverware, helped to organize the disparate and slightly odd objects collected in my tabletop arrangements. 

     In 2005 I found a set of antique toy knights at a flea market, made of lead in the 1940’s. There were seven of them – one on an armored horse and the other six were standing.  After I refitted their missing plumes with bright purple and yellow feathers, these lead knights began to animate my painted “stories.”  I began to fit separate panels together, abutting edges in long narrative lines. With the Passage of Time (Seemingly Unimportant Events Take on Greater Significance) - completed in 2007 – was a painting that consisted of five contiguous panels, covering a span of nine feet. Like the dusty bottles of Georgio Morandi, I did not choose to paint toy knights and the other objects I used, as forms for strict, literal interpretations. Nor did I see them as a foil for abstraction.  Instead, they were somewhere in-between. To find the compelling edge between memory and dream is the crux of my painting. My toy knights suggested thoughts of “the quest” without the need to illustrate a literal story.

A Quiet Lonely Place

The other afternoon, while we stared out the window, hunched over beers with our backs curved like beetles, someone asked me, “What are you trying to do in your paintings anyway?” I answered;

 Well, I don’t know. It has something to do with the things that I see. I like to tell people about the things that I see. Like the time I saw a farmer, way off in the distance, plowing his field. He would just glide along. The haze in the warm air made it look surreal, almost ghostly. Or I’d like to tell about the time I watched the cat stalk a mouse. She was so still - a dark mound against a bright green field which was like moss because the cows had eaten the grass down so low. When finally she pounced, I watched her carry her mouse straight to the chicken coop where she sat halfway in and halfway out in the bright sunlight. Or maybe I’d tell about a line of white sheets in the wind or about the dazzling red and blue tattoos which run up and down Big Jim’s arm at the Applegate Tavern.  Or I could tell about the time Frank and I climbed up the tree to watch baby owls. All they did was clack their beaks at us. It kind of echoed, it was so quiet up there and the wind rocked the tree back and forth. When it got dark we climbed down and on our way out of the woods we found an old white tub with weeds growing inside of it. (We were glad that it was just weeds and not someone with wild mushrooms growing out of their eyes.) And there was that time when we were playing horseshoes out back and heat lightening flashed in the dark. And I remember the time I saw an old man walk from his farmhouse to his roadside mailbox right after the mail-truck drove away. It took him a long time to get there, shuffling through snow.  When he finally opened his box, there was one small, red card inside.  I was glad for him - glad that he had a card to open and bring back to his farmhouse where he lived alone. I guess that’s it too; I guess that’s why I paint. I want to make paintings that can be like that small red card – to make something secret and wonderful for someone to open in a quiet, lonely place.

Vague but Lingering Memories

    Across the road a farm lane runs north to the grey ruins of a once grand Victorian farmhouse. An overgrown hedge hides broken-down porches. On the ground in front rest two fallen columns, memorials to past grandeur. Inside, doorways and windows are trimmed with elaborate molding, the paint cracked and peeling. Floral wallpaper hangs in tatters on the walls of empty rooms. Bits of newspaper, nutshells and seeds, litter the floor beneath cracked plaster. Open doors and windows stare out at apple trees overgrown with grapevines. The smell is of decay, forgotten names, lost hope, and vague but lingering memories.

     On a summer evening I sit in my studio and hear the distant barking of a dog, the rhythmic sound of insects.  The dying breeze stirs murmuring voices in the willow outside. The voices are from the past, intangible, poised at the edge of a void yet never filling it. That void is in me, linking the past to the future, briefly rendered, but not stopped.