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Harold
Weston, Frost Before Night, oil on canvas (1939) |
Harold Weston
(1894 – 1972)
Despite the frigid day, he
takes a wedge,
a double-edged axe and a
splitter,
(called a peedunk by
lumberjacks in these parts),
and cuts some curly maple and
yellow birch.
His hands sting with each
swing.
The pistol-crack of each log
ricochets
off the flanks of Lower Wolf
Jaw.
It is 1920. At twenty-five,
he is strong,
fitness hard-won against a
bout
of teenage polio, Harvard and
a sheltered life.
Like Thoreau, he went into
the wilds
to find his freedom, hoping
the woods
would teach him how to paint.
They call him
the Hermit of St.
Huberts—that “crazy artist”
who lives alone under the
slopes of Giant.
His cabin is hewn from
hemlock
and spruce—spare as a Shaker
hutch.
No electricity, no
insulation,
just a tarpaper roof and
water, sluiced
from a spring off Noonmark.
Behind, a modest outhouse
hides in the balsam grove. He
brings
only the bare essentials: a
table, a cot,
two chairs, blankets and warm
clothes,
a coffee pot and kerosene
lamp, a frying pan
and kettle, and most
crucial—a potbellied stove.
Feeble as a clawless cat, it
tries to fend
against the arctic winds,
which sneak,
like invisible mice, through
the chinks
in the beams. They gnaw all
winter at his bones.
Once a month, he hikes to
Keene Valley
to pack in food supplies,
then gets his mail
from a boarding house run by
Spencer Nye.
Some nights, he stays and
joins the crew
of ice cutters ‘round a
well-stoked fire,
swapping tall tales. The men
are stiff
and numb, half-beat from the
cold,
hands and feet itchy with
chilblains.
They’ve been out on the pond
all day
with horse teams and sleds,
carving furrows in that hard
white field—
ploughing three-foot cakes of
ice,
then plucking the turquoise
cubes with giant tongs
out of Chapel Pond and
hauling
the slippery load down to
town.
Mostly, he just hikes and
paints. In the future,
he’ll
paint John Dos Passos and Felix Adler,
but for now, it’s the
chiseled faces
of these mountains he most
loves.
The profile of each peak
is etched on the canvas of
his heart.
A photo shows him hiking in
snowshoes,
wearing a heavy coat and
high-laced boots.
He stands tall in the
powdered snow
on the Upper Lake. He clasps
a six foot staff. Under his
glasses,
he wears a thin beard and a
big grin.
He has just hiked down from
Inlet Camp
in a snow squall and seen a
snowbow
arching over Gothics.
That rainbow would wrap
around him
and keep him warm
the rest of his life.
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Vry Roussin, Lower Lake,
oil on canvas (1997) |
Vryling Corscaden Roussin
(1944
– 2004)
Vry’s first masterpiece
was the bathroom sink.
She painted it hot pink
with her mother’s nail polish
at the age of five. From then
on,
Art was the life for her.
Color
was something she felt and
breathed—
not just saw. Once, I heard
her exclaim,
“I just discovered brown!”
As if it never existed
before.
She lived a life without
lines.
When she taught us to draw a
chair,
she’d say, “Don’t draw the
chair,
draw the space around it.”
She knew the color of
in-between.
She was bright and exuberant,
like her freckles and red
hair—
breathless as splashes of
tangerine
that burst across her
canvas,
giddy as tropical birds.
Her barn was a picture of who
she was.
Upstairs: a cluttered studio
full of paints
half-finished canvases,
palettes, brushes,
and dirty rags reeking of
turpentine.
Downstairs: one half—a long
gallery,
the other, a piece-meal
kitchen, a tiny bedroom
and cluttered day room.
Outside: an organic garden
and a yard full of
wrought-iron sculptures—
standing like mechanical
giants,
who had rusted as they
played.
Once, after Art School, Vry
unrolled
for Harold, on the living
room floor,
a large mural she’d done—of
cows
standing shin-deep in a
stream.
By then, Weston was gaunt,
gray as driftwood, crowbar
bent,
but when he saw Vry’s
bovines,
his body grew buoyant—
his eyes widened eagerly
to weigh and absorb this
feast of light.
Vry learned to live in the
Now,
knowing, with cancer, that
today
was all she had. She never
lingered
over her old work—was happy
to see it gone,
or not. (She had let so many
of her darlings go.)
Her favorite painting was
always the next one.
During her last months, she
painted
the color of Hope—vast pale
blue skies,
which is where, in the end,
she flew,
like a Firebird.
