Berkshire naturalist Thom Smith finds late-summer wildflowers in the fields. A quick glance along August roadsides will immediately reveal white flowers, yellow flowers, pink flowers, orange flowers, all intense, and competing for the attention of pollinating insects of all shapes, sizes and descriptions. Among them grows a purple-blue blossom with […]
Read articleGuild of Berkshire Artists gathers color in West Stockbridge
The painter caught my eye, standing on the grass outside the old town hall. Straw hat and smock, pallette and easil — a plein air artist made of straw. On the easil, splashes of bright color announced that the Richmond-West Stockbridge Artists Guild has an exhibit running (August and September […]
Read articleEdith Wharton comedies return live to Shakespeare & Company
Two women are sitting at an outdoor table at the cool end of a hot day in Rome. They are looking out at the ruins of the Roman forum, and they have known each other since they were teenagers. On another ridge, another woman is thinking with longing and fear of […]
Read articleCubist and Surrealist encounters at the Clark — BTW column
The cloth of her shirt ripples like light on water, and above her three circles of light shine like bubbles or sun on a lens. This is a self-portrait. Dora Maar was about 28 when she made it. I can imagine her in her darkroom, shaping light and shade on […]
Read articleAndy Warhol meets Norman Rockwell in the Berkshires
James Warhola remembers his Uncle Andy in his uncle’s first New York apartment, sketching high-heeled shoes for an advertisement in the New York Times. He would ink the drawing and blot it, a technique he would use later in his artwork. When his uncle first painted a Campbell’s soup can, […]
Read articleMilkweed gives a landing place for monarch butterflies
Berkshire naturalist Thom Smith goes looking for butterflies and their food plants. This early August afternoon, before a heavy rain drove me home, I watched two monarchs apparently mating and another acting as if it would soon be laying eggs. I found them on milkweed plants. Flower and weed […]
Read article‘Intimate Apparel’ weaves sensual textures and sadness at Shakespeare & Co.
The Japanese silk is woven through with a golden thread and dyed with a light scent of fruit. It is 1905 in New York City, and a seamstress makes makes corsets to fit smoothly against the skin. But closeness and sensuality are complicated, and what is life-giving when it is real […]
Read articleTurn Park Art Space sculpture reflects with humor in West Stockbridge
I was sitting on a cliff edge in a rocking chair. Bees were moving in the meadow flowers, even in a light rain, and Don Quixote with rivets in his shoulders held a daisy in his fingers. He was looking at it round-eyed. The new Turn Park Art Space in West Stockbridge […]
Read articleCamille A. Brown shares a sense of play at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival
On a summer night, children are playing in the dusk. Their families can tell the games from the words they hear — Red light, Green light. Marco Polo. Three girls are jumping rope on the sidewalk. Their friends are calling out rhymes like the clapping games they teach each other on […]
Read articleMusic flies free at Falcon Ridge Folk Festival — BTW column
Adam Ezra calls two friends in the audience up to the stage. They are musicians from Boston, like him. Got your ax? he says, and the woman beside him tunes her fiddle. He strums the opening bars, and the musicians around him casually pick up the beat. They hand off […]
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