Speicherhouse by Charles Rosen, in the WSA landscape show.
What is it about a place that attracts people? Fords and falls, bays and crossroads? But what draws artists and thinkers, and those wishing to commune with something more inspiring than mundane? Why one small valley, when there are so many around?
Why this place?
Answers will abound as artists and townsfolk gather at the opening of a monumental new exhibit of local landscapes spanning more than a century of works, at the Woodstock School of Art on Saturday, September 14 (an opening will take place 3 p.m.-5 p.m. that day.) Most will be visually imparted, meant to be taken in quietly, soulfully, the way we take in landscapes themselves.
But that’s the magic of The Woodstock Landscape: Then and Now, curated by current WSA president Kate McGloughlin. By including singular works — by everyone from Birge Harrison, John Carlson, Bolton Brown, Carl Eric Lindin and other artists who first moved into the community 100 plus years ago, through the modernists and expressionists of the 1920s and 1930s to such current landscape painters as Tor Gudmundson, Eva Van Rijn, Mariella Bisson, and McGloughlin herself — what comes through is less a view of individual talents, or trends in painting, as the sense of place, and how it continually provides inspiration.
Yes, there are gaps…none of the abstractions pulled from the hills and trees, skies and winters, and autumn colors, or the outsider pieces, or photography and sculpture, pulled into existence by where we are in the show. And yet in the WSA’s handsome, timelessly-Woodstock Robert Angeloch Gallery — centered on the school’s historic campus, once home to the Arts Students League — this collection feels somehow perfect for the moment. And cathartic, given how it will mirror so many of the changes going on all around us over the coming weeks, as the show runs through November 2.