when studio for the state is in its twenty first year and the local part i think we are sixteen so some of us are part of the state and some of us are just doing tour there are thirteen artists represented in those six artists actually here in the gallery we only play under one five but the weather has made it impossible for the six one to be out under t interacting with people and that's fine that's and that's it just opens up and it gets inspires you to go back in your studio and i remember back when the map the open studio map used to be one large map for that out and fun the best part i think for artists was just to sort of meet other people who work in your community as artists as he was going on what i enjoy the most is people who come in really not to so much to buy things but they want to see how things are made which was kind of the original idea of open studio i love the social aspect of that it's so nice to interact with people who are looking at your work and you can talk about it and you just meet a lot of new faces and people who you don't open a studio has fifteen pieces that are part of a body of work about water migration and the title of the work is waters that bow to a lake and they feature waters that come from very small little places bogs marshes swamps wetlands and that have a destination to a greater body of water which in most of these cases is lake champlain and there's a section of work that features bodies of water that fall into lake michigan so that is the major part of the work that stems stairs and then there's colored pencil drawings that i have done which i do mostly in the summer and then there's other fabric pieces that go back a few years that are not part of the series and it starts just with big swatches of colors and then the pieces get smaller and smaller as the detail gets finer and finer and the thread work is not just to hold the pieces in place but the thread work becomes textural and as i get to the completion of a piece i'm actually drawing with the thread in a swatch of maybe three inches by three inches i might change the thread six seven or eight times because it's shading that i'm wanting i wanted to have something wild free and crazy i was tired of the hand work that went into quilting and i wanted to do raw edges and i didn't want to have everything turned under and stitched and i wanted to rip and i wanted to curl fabric i wanted to sometimes use the reverse side so i just began experimenting with layering and layering and ripping and adding and tearing and balling up fabric just to get different the gallery got involved recently as a headquarters to try to bring consolidation to the artists in the area so that the public would have an opportunity to get an idea of where everybody moves and what we have to offer most of the artists on the tour when you can still get to them one artist mary mary you know up on probably road will be open until sunday so she's missing one whole day of the tour and then there's other roads that have been closed we have but are now open and the public doesn't necessarily know that these artists are out  writer you're always working on the process of writing and you're not sure always where your words are going and you let them lead you sometimes and what is just the same when i start a log take a piece of wood and start interesting and fairly unpredictable appeals to me most of what i do is returning so i make wooden balls all kinds of mind hardwoods and i also have a lot of interesting scraps left over from which i make little things i call cheese knives or a butter spreader i only work with them on hardwoods sugar maple black cherry yellow birch those kinds of  photos and that's just the single photos bookmarks and magnets and i also have a book that i put together that's got shots over the last three or four years i have retired from architect and become the artist that always was i was trained as a grassman before computers and i used to grow blue prints on linen and from there i combined that talent with water colors which flow glance capes and i've been really focusing on texture using really fine line to find office i think from what little norway and settled in brooklyn and some row houses and i used to look out the true out the windows at the street like all of life it's a circle of song for coming full circle back to something i really love i make shaker and scandinavian style bentwood boxes the scandinavian boxes maybe not a spirit definitely not a scandinavian boxes go back to the six century the viking era and it's a it's a craft that's still kept in in norway and  the shaker boxes started in the late seventeen hundreds of through the eighteen hundreds was the heyday of the shakers and they made them for their own use as well as a cash crop they would sell to the general public traditionally it would be sugar maple an eastern white pine i make with a variety now cherry and now i'm experimenting with this happens to be maple burl and cherry i work in water color and this is what i normally work in when i'm doing illustration so i find that  by changing medium then i learn more about it informs the other media and so i skip back and forth they each have parts of them they and the posters there are a couple of things on the posters the lawn trail which runs behind westfall so i do work on my local area vermont wasn't really a great of a famous tourist poor it was more of an appalachian state and it was you know agriculture was the only game in town and there was some industrial centers but that wasn't where people were traveling been here full time as an artist for eleven years mostly stone sculpture a also do some copper work now as well lot of relief carving in stone as well as just abstract sculpture i do a lot of lettering in stone as well that has to be quite a bit of my businesses custom lettering and custom wording on stones we have a sculpture garden outside as well and you know days like today we don't actually go out there that often but some people do want to go out regardless of rain says so i like to use repurposed good seller to take like old fire extinguishers and tea pots and stuff like that and combine them and make them into something that's more practical than going to waste and so the guitar strings are tune you can actually play the thing one of my best friends in the world mike smith was on the open city tour last year in this here for the state map and this year yesterday actually yesterday morning his road washed out and his bridge washed out and subsequently he had to drop out of open studio and i said you know why don't you come here and display your stuff here and we'll figure it out and so he built a footbridge and hauled his art across the river to  he's got a great sense of humor his play on words for his titles as phenomenal as a lot of regulars on the open tour that inspired me to keep going and i think that's kind of what my studio is what it is because  y specialty is really laminated pieces where i glue woods of different species together to form some sort of a pattern and then i'll turn that into a ball or travel mug or whatever i'm making that day my main emphasis is on vermont hardwoods and that means cherry and maple and birch and ash are the primary ones but are not a little bit last because we don't have much of it anymore african mahogany is a big one  from central and south america we have words like yellow hearts purple hearts eucalyptus a number of other species different kinds of mahogany rosewood and they add the color and the texture to my piece that i've been putting this the studio together for the last thirty years and i used to work as a wood worker and contractor so i started collecting my tools back then and then i in the last fifteen years i focused on the woodturning my best selling item is my travel mug which it's several pieces of wood again from different parts of the world  it's glued together in a block and then it's put on the lathe this fall is made by spacing in this case there are forty eight individual pieces of wood here that are glued onto a using  glued on to the base and then i add the rim oh add some decorative bands on the outside and then that's a new style of all that i'm just getting into my women's jewelry earrings bracelets playing around with rings now necklaces i like to use fresh water pearls and gemstones and some gold but mostly silver a lot of fine silver a little bit of sterling the fine silver is nice because it it's light for airings it's much lighter weight and it doesn't you can make bigger earrings without it pulling it nearer so that's nice and by everything there and so there's a lot of there's a lot of asian influence but kind of all over celtic some african so i like i like everything to look like it has some history to it i like to have hidden meanings and symbols in there and usually when somebody finds a pairings or ring they just it speaks to them and they have to have that or they say oh my sister would love this or i liked it i like it to have some connection i always wanted to make jewelry when i was young i love digging through my maternal relatives jewelry boxes and finding little treasures and i i just thought that you know actually being able to make that would just be so one mazing i have a kiln i have tumblers dryers all kinds of carvers and brushes and sanders and i love tools so i have a lot of tools well it's nice because it's right off the kitchen and if i have some time i can come in here for a little bit and if i have a lot of time i can come in here and shut the door and tell everyone to go find daddy for a question and i can just stay in here so to the rack crew is what i've been doing the longest and so that's what i'm better known for and people do get attracted to the cult the bright colors and the patterns and designs on them which are very deliberate recently i have been doing s or pottery that work is not decorated ahead of time as my raghu pottery and i put it in a gas fire prone propane fire chelm and tied to a clay container that is filled with combustible materials and i feel that and fire very slowly to about twenty one hundred degrees in cool it very slowly and the inside of that happens fear of the sagarin so volatile that it leaves a great pattern the marks on the i'm definitely my work has become much more organic and hand built i am doing figure sculpture now and so the pottery that i am still doing has definitely taken on those elements  becoming more organic and just free form not necessarily thrown on the potter's wheel for how where the weather is and the fact that our road was washed out in three places that we've had i've had a steady flow of people all day so this is been really amazing and i'm quite quite thrilled and surprised pieces that i have some of them i've had for a while and they work better and so they sort of stood the test of time some of us my older southwestern inspired the work they went from black and white photography into painting i fell in love with the fact that i could use color so freely so i started to use these particular issues in my work to explain storytelling and explain the path my earliest pieces have to deal with some of those stories that are partially revealed in the landscape so some of the pieces here i'm paying the fisc henri you're looking at a place in vermont that you know billion new million plus years old it's was both photographed them i was sort of struck by how the monotones of the greys and the blues that were coming out when i photographed and also how those natural sculptural forms are just so very modern have a whole wall full of them which are from the more from the west which are painted hills in eastern oregon where there was a gigantic lava eruption and you know a long long time ago and actually those colors are in the landscape   like overwhelming as an artist the turtle is is been one of my childhood and so forth going i guess and i'm off for a long long time i'm intrigued by the fact that she carries her home on her back so i'm very much love the story of how the earth was created on the back of turtle how various animals went down and scooped up the mud and they put it on turtles back and created the