Richard Chandler

Being a plein air painter, I focus mainly on landscapes. Man's effect on and interaction with his environment fascinate me.

Preferring to paint landscapes where the hand of man is apparent, the structures included in the paintings take on new meaning. The roads, fences and buildings that punctuate the compositions are obvious symbols of man, yet also represent his link to the world. This idea serves as the impetus for many of my paintings.

My experience as a Weir Farm artist has been wonderful. I feel I have an affinity for the place and its natural beauty. My February residency was snowy: white, gray and cerulean. The red cedar and the blue spruce were the brightest colors in the undulating landscape. Violet stone walls and the shadows of bare trees created patterns and movement in fields cut the previous fall. There was the black ice on the pond, and the skies responded with the promise of spring with green fringed clouds.

An intimate dialogue exists between man and nature. Architecture is the language of this dialogue. With a background in architectural history and design, I feel well versed in this vernacular. My paintings that have resulted from my Weir Farm experience celebrate this timeless relationship between people and the natural world.

SPRING SKY, 2000
oil on canvas, 42 x 58 inches

Maureen Cummins

The year I spent at Weir Farm was a time of inspired peripatia, the work created was the result of both real and imaginary meanderings. The first pieces I produced, Artist's Books, Inventory, and Ghost Diary, made direct use of images, texts and objects unearthed in the Farm's extensive archive. The next crop of work, Current Events, Archive of Memory, and Declining Futures was an unusual group of hybrids, mixtures of the wild and the cultivated. In content, these works seriously address issues of the earth and environment, while in form they playfully reference the rarefied materials and carefully preserved ephemera found in libraries and archives. "Cataloguing" nature in this way led to a consideration of the darker aspects of collecting and to a work on paper that is visually reminiscent of a naturalist’s notebook. Entitled Life Cycle of an Emerging Artist, it presents images and experiences from an artist’s life in which an exotic species is dissected and classified.

The final work included in the exhibit was a response to the story of J. Alden Weir's first wife, Anna, who died within days of giving birth to her daughter Cora. In the piece entitled Elegy for Anna, I explore the conflicting and contradictory emotions that must arise when birth and death coincide.

Steven Dolbin

I was aware of Weir Farm long before I ever had the opportunity to go there, having vicariously visited (as many of us have) through its depiction in many paintings. I believe it existed for me purely in my imagination. A collective memory built from my exposure to painted images, illusionary surfaces, windows with a context and a view all their own. When actually visiting the Farm, I was overwhelmed by a different kind of realit: a powerful presence of place based on physical senses. The warmth of the sun on my face, the buzz of an insect lighting on my brow, the feel of a rough stone on my down turned palm, all sensations beyond vision.

I found myself on a lengthy investigative journey. Examining the ethereal existence of the place and the legendary figures of art that inhabited the place, versus the actual existence of the land and those artists of the past as fellow living beings. The aim for me was to make real the physicality of the place and the human bodies that worked at the Farm, as if after listening to the Arthurian legends for a lifetime to then visit Camelot for oneself. Could one reconcile these worlds? This was my task.

As a sculptor I strive to make my impressions tangible by actually occupying three-dimensional space. Something to touch and move around, like the actual experience one has when encountering Weir Farm. Not only addressing the place with vision, but with touch and movement through actual stone, wood and soil of landscape that is the Farm.

Hopefully in creating tangible objects that we view today, I have created a feeling of connection, a moment of aesthetic arrest for the contemporary audience. Thus, joining us spiritually with this very special place that is Weir Farm and those human entities that have passed through it before us.

Camille Eskell

My initial approach to the Weir Farm project involved exploring a sense of place, in view of the land and an ongoing reference to growth (through foliage) in my more recent work. As my ideas unfolded, prompted by upheaval in my life, the inquiry broadened to cover greater ground: the focus became one's sense of place - the artist's place - in the world. Visits to the Farm consisted of musing, noting impressions, and collecting bits such as leaves, acorns, and twigs, for possible inclusion in the series. My search was for a common spirit that melded human with earth, stressing an intellectual rather than a physical connection. The notion of preservation and tribute that defined the site suggested themes of persistence and loss, treasure and burial, fossilization and commemoration.

Having recently returned to figurative mixed media sculpture, I continued to work in this vein. I combined cast body fragments with direct or digitally reproduced drawings, and used floral laces, dried and faux flowers as references to romance and revivification. The "artist's hand" becomes a recurring motif, and repeated images of mouths recall the unexpressed.

The presentation formats, in particular, translate the duality and heighten the sense of arrested power. Keepsake boxes hold severed hands and fractured faces like relics or mementos, protecting and entombing them behind sliding doors with dainty ribbon pulls. Torsos hang suspended, and drawings align in intimate installations. Collectively the work questions what the "artist" means, what it mean to be an artist, and ultimately, the means by which one is an artist.

UNTITLED, 2001
palladium print on Rives paper
22 x 30

Thomas Mezzanotte

Gained over years spent in the studio, I came to Weir Farm expecting to apply my way of working to the New England landscape. I grew up not far from Weir Farm in Trumbull, Connecticut. In the 1950's, that landscape was essentially this landscape. New England stone walled woods, small farms and apple orchards were my playgrounds as a child. By the mid-1960's these playgrounds had become "the suburbs," as Trumbull gave up its rural character to cookie cutter capes, ranches and split-levels.

When I became seriously dedicated to photography as an art form, it was the medium that captured my imagination. My search was through process. This magic of capturing an exact image on light sensitive metallic salts propelled me on an extraordinary journey of discovery. For over twenty years I have worked exclusively in the studio because it was there that I could control the process and let my imagination direct the journey. The results have been wonderful.

And so I took these results, this method of working, and went to Weir Farm expecting to just plug it in. It didn't happen. I found myself frustrated by the lack of control. I was using a twelve-foot camera obscura to do large pinhole images, but the wind shook the camera during the long time exposures. I wanted to develop the images on site to get a feel for how they looked, as I did in the studio, but it was either too hot or too cold to use my chemicals. I wanted the light to come from a different direction, but the sun was stubborn.

The landscape was not to be had on my terms and so eventually, I accepted its terms and went where it demanded. This work, these soft focused pinhole images, are the results of those demands. They are also, strangely, the images of my memories. They look to me like nothing so much as my mind's eye view of a childhood spent here, in these New England woods.

Thomas Mezzanotte has been exploring the potentials of the photographic medium for over thirty years. He was educated at the University of Bridgeport where he became the director of the Carlson Gallery in the late eighties. He teaches in schools across Connecticut as a Connecticut Commission on the Arts Master Teaching Artist. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the country. Last year he had one-person shows at New York University, New York, NY, and The Silvermine Guild Gallery, New Canaan, CT, and was included in shows at The Santa Fe College of Art, Santa Fe, NM; Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR; and The George Eastman House, Rochester, NY. Mr. Mezzanotte has won numerous grants and awards including two Connecticut Commission on the Arts individual artist grants. His work was featured in the book The Art of Enhanced Photography by Rockport Press and was published this past summer in View Camera magazine.

Michael Torlen

SONGS FOR MY FATHER: LIGHT FROM THE WOODS
Weir Farm, 2001
mixed media painted transfer

I think of my work with the landscape of Weir Farm as a dialogue, a conversation with a medium and a site. In this conversation, the landscape's seasons, weather, time and light are implied in the variations, interpretations and reinterpretations. The fit of the medium to the subject matter is a metaphor; just as Nature creates unique, particular variations of the landscape so my mixed media painted transfers express an analogous order within a series. The original motif is visible in each variation, yet no two are exactly alike.

J. Alden Weir, who was both a painter and printmaker, built a portable studio pulled by oxen and used oil paints packaged in tubes in order to paint the landscape, directly, out of doors. These were two technological and artistic choices that, in his day, were new. I too am responding to the landscape through a contemporary medium, consistent with my temperament, artistic vision and period.

My mixed media painted transfers are hybrid print-based works on paper that incorporate field work, photography, computer editing, digital printing, traditional printmaking, and hand painting. The merging of pigmented digital information with handwork and 19th and 20th century painting and printmaking technology embraces traditional artistic practice while using modern tools and techniques.

The larger context for my artistic project, Songs for My Father, is a body of nearly 1,000 works, inspired by the land and sea, in various media, dedicated to my late father, a Norwegian commercial fisherman. I painted the landscape, a long-standing Nordic subject, in and around Acadia National Park, Maine, during the 1980's, and have worked on Monhegan Island since 1995. In winter 1999, while an artist-in-residence at Weir Farm, I began to explore the woodlands as a complement to the seacoast.

Michael Torlen is an Associate Professor of Visual Art at Purchase College, State University of New York where he teaches painting and drawing. Mr. Torlen has exhibited widely, including one-person exhibitions at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; Luise Ross Gallery, New York, NY; and the Alexander Milliken Gallery, New York, NY, among others. His work is in numerous collections including the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, JP Morgan Chase, Pepsico Inc., and Deloitte & Touche.

JUNE 7 THRU JULY 26, 2002

WEIR FARM: VISITING ARTISTS 2001

Richard Lang Chandler
Maureen Cummins
Steven Dolbin
Camille Eskell
Thomas Mezzanotte
Michael Torlen

OPENING RECEPTION
THURSDAY, JUNE 13, 5:30 - 7:30 PM

PANEL DISCUSSION
THURSDAY, JUNE 13, 5:00 PM

To read about WEIR FARM and their Visiting Artist Program...