The Art Farm

Against the most azure sky, bright bursts of flaming orange and red leaves spun down around me as I made my way through the winding roads of the Boquet Valley. I couldn't think of a more beautiful time of year in the Adirondacks to explore the Boquet Valley Studio Tour of artists' workspaces in Elizabethtown, Essex, Westport, and Willsboro, NY. It was a day that held the perfect match of visually stunning Adirondack scenery and arresting visual art.

The Boquet Valley Studio Tour – new this year – was created by Painting Conservator, Emily Phillips. Phillips (of Phillips Art Conservation, Essex, NY) is a passionate art lover. After moving back to the Boquet Valley area — micro-region rich with working artists – she thought an artist's studio tour was just the thing to draw more attention to the high concentration of talent around her. This year, the tour features painters Ellen Few Anderson, Kevin Raines and Alison Weld, glass artisan Helen Goetz, potter Meredith Johnston and sculptor and painter, Edward Cornell. The free tour ran three days and was open from 10am to 5pm, giving people a chance to catch everything they wanted to see. I spent Friday afternoon at The Art Farm at Crooked Brook Studios of painter and sculptor, Edward Cornell – an artist whose work I have long admired.

Edward Cornell (or, "Ted," as many people know him) has such a vast artistic background in almost every art form – visual arts, theatre, writing – that it's hard to know where to begin. I first met Ted at the Depot Theatre in Westport, and after a few subsequent encounters, I learned a little of his history within the theatre world. Ted trained at the Yale Drama School with Stella Adler and was an early associate of Joseph Papp at the Public Theatre. While working with Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival, he became the first managing director of the Festival's experimental wing, The Other Stage, where he directed No Place to Be Somebody, the Festival's first Pulitzer Prize winner. He has taught at NYU, Circle in the Square, Hofstra University and The Actors Studio. He is an Obie Award winner and directed the first Off Broadway play ever to win the Pulitzer Prize. His generosity and deep affection for the Arts in his Adirondack community led him to being instrumental in reviving the Whallonsburg Grange Hall in Whallonsburg, NY. The Grange is now a vibrant community space for music, art shows and theatre. He calls Wadhams, NY home and here he works sculpting, drawing and painting.

It seems almost accidental as you drive along on Sayre Road in Wadhams, NY. I crested a hill and found myself facing a rough-yet-elegant steel sculpture poised in a panoramic and rustic Adirondack farmscape. There's an eye-rubbing "what did I just stumble on" moment as you approach Crooked Brook Studios. The sweeping vista of the mountains, and the lines of trees are punctuated by these artifacts that run the spectrum from unadorned and outmoded farm equipment to, well, something else, as if the machinery, put out to pasture, began to think "is this really all there is?" And clearly, it isn't all. The machines, the pieces, the containers, the barns – the very land itself – seems to be caught up in an evolution toward a profound expression.

The pieces emerge from landscape rather than intruding on it. There is an easy flow when you walk the farm and observe the industrial textures against this natural landscape. As I walked the low rise from the parking area to the barn, a favorite Cornell sculpture rose into view: "The Angel of Inerrancy Conveying Well-meaning Souls to Hell". It's a large, intricate and powerful piece at sixteen feet long almost fourteen feet high. It was recently featured in Adirondack History Center Museum retrospective of Cornell's work, "Inside the Landscape," occupying the Museum's front lawn for several months. Cornell first began work on "The Angel" back in 2004 with his son Noah, when the two "used their tractor to pull a substantial piece of twelve foot long, three foot diameter piping made of quarter inch sheet iron out of the swamp and then put a bend in its already belabored shape by twisting it around a tree," said Cornell. "These awesome sections of unusually heavy pipe found occasionally in our area are remnants of the original power generating turbines of Wadhams that supplied power to the mines in Port Henry," said Cornell. The piece is both of the landscape, but also carves shapes and forms out of it's surroundings, like many of the sculptures on the Art Farm. Cornell said he hopes that the sculpture, in its present location overlooking the pond, "will hopefully encourage visitors to contemplate the long, slow journey of the well-meaning souls."

After exploring the farm I headed into the barn-that-is-not-a-barn that serves as a gallery to check out some large canvases and a number of less element-resistant three-dimensional pieces that hang on the walls and from the lofted 20-foot plus high rafters. Aside from being mostly empty space and a massive wall of windows on one end, it's still very much a barn. It's an inviting space that encourages you to spend time with the work. Each piece is given its due – in that way, more like the lobby of a large metro museum than a gallery. There was a table filled with sand where Ted invited people to participate in creating their own piece of sand art with a collection of had-been cracker packages, honey dispensers and bottle caps. It was very therapeutic to play in the sand with the simple implements, and Ted remarked that it was, in fact, used as a kind of therapy. I thought it was very much in his character to invite you over to tour his studio, and then deflect your attention to a pile of sand for you to play in instead. He has a genius for avoiding attention.

Near the end of my tour, Cornell invited me to see a space in the lower part of the barn where he is storing some paintings he has for sale. I ended up finishing my art-filled afternoon on the perfect note: I purchased a beautiful painting by Ted Cornell. As I walked to my car and looked at the stirring painting, I knew that it would always remind me of the great time I spent at the Art Farm and the wonderful and talented man behind it all.
To find out more about when you can visit The Art Farm at Crooked Brook Studios call Edward Cornell at 518-962-4386 or email him at cornelle@westelcom.com. Check back here at Lakeplacid.com for future exhibit dates of Cornell's work and information on next year's Boquet Valley Studio Tour.