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 2017) in the 1854 Town Hall.
I walked in the open door and discovered Margie Skaggs preparing for the opening, and she good-naturedly gave me a tour of the room and told me the history of her own stoneware pottery: delicate bowls finished with a Chinese celadon glaze the color of pale jade that goes back a thousand years or more; a thrown jug with curved sides shaped into flat planes and tinted with a Japanese Shiro glaze; wood-fired vessels.
Nearby, Joy Cameron’s soap-stone sculpture suggests two figures leaning together. She has named it Paolo and Francesca for the lovers in Dante’s Inferno who fell into each other’s arms over a book.
The show ranges over water colors, oils, drawings and photography, abstracts and landscapes and portraits, wood ducks on a melting pond, a heron in the tall grass.
The guild has been busy this summer, Skaggs tells me, and will keep going through the fall. Many of these artists will open their studios for informal visitors in September and October, and the guild has an ongoing exhibit at the Berkshire Humane Society to benefit both groups.
On a quiet afternoon in a small town, it’s a wash of color: red-headed woodpecker, golden peaches, big sky country, purple garlic skin and frost on a mountain ridge.
Adrian Holmes' watercolor 'No. 6 Train' appears at the Richmond-West Stockbridge Artist Guild exhibit at the 1854 Old Town Hall in West Stockbridge.
Kay Lerner's Big Sky #2 brings back the feel of sage brush and open space in Wyoming near groves of quaking aspen. Photo by Kate Abbott
Bernard Isaacson's 'Pileated Woodpecker' makings a striking show on a warm day. Photo by Kate Abbott
Doanne Perry's 'Peaches' glow with a light like sunset.
Ilene Spiewak's portrait inspired by novelist and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison.
Margie Skaggs has shaped her hand-thrown stoneware jug and tinted it with a historid Japanese Shiro glaze.
Traditional wood firing gives Margie Skaggs' vessel a patina of smoke and ash.
Joy Cameron's soapstone sculpture 'Paola and Francesca' recalls the loers in Dante's Inferno who read aloud to each other until their feelings overtook their words.
Carol Kelly's 'Abandonned' recalls fishing towns on the coast.
Helen Febo's 'Wait or Leave' ripples in abstract colors like oil on water.