Grier Horner, Artist Blog, Portrait of an Old Man

OK. Which of the following places would you consider as a place to hold an art show? Gallery, museum, mansion, empty store? All good possibilities. What about facility for the elderly? Kimball Farms in Lenox specifically? I'd have said, "No."

But The Farms' community outreach coordinator, Sharon Lazerson, has proved it can be done and done well.

Take her current show that opened Monday, "Berkshires X Four." It is beautifully staged along wide corridors and one good-sized room just off the main entrance. The four, all good artists, are Rosemary Starace of Pittsfield, Dai Ban of Great Barrington, Charles Schweigert of Pittsfield and Elmer Orobio of Sheffield.

Starace's fine paintings Mare and Foal in the shot above demonstrate the quality of the work being shown. Another of her pieces, much smaller, is the monotype Double Star below.

As in many of her monotypes in this show, Starace is trying to work unconsciously to bring together elements of water, blood, and perhaps the universe. This one is Darkest Hour. Two of her works were sold.

Let's take a look at Orobio's powerful Broken Torso hammered so full of square-cut flooring nails that it makes the arrow wounds in the classical paintings of St. Sebastian look superficial.

Born in the jungle in Columbia where his father had a lumber mill, Orobio grew up making his own toys out of scrap wood. As a young adult he became interested in Rudolph Steiner's teaching methods and in 1999 left South America to become a woodworking teacher at the Steiner School in Great Barrington. There he makes his sculpture alongside his students.

The work of Dai Ban, the second sculptor in the show, is currently minimalist. Here's his Crow Sleeps Through the Night. Man, I love that title and its namesake. It was done in 2018.

This one is Becoming a Dark Thing. Contrast these with his Bishop(below), completed years earlier. Unlike the light-weight precision board he uses on Crow Sleeps Through the Night and Becoming a Dark Thing, Bishop is of bronze and black marble. And it is figurative.

Dan knew what his older work would look like before he started. With the minimalist work, he is trying to avoid that. He tries to wipe his mind clear of intentional thought, works fast "and what happens then seems to emerge from some deep subconscious reservoir."

Now comes Charles Schweigert and his acrylic painting Fire and Ice, which was sold.

So to get to the show go into the Kimball Farms road off Walker Street in Lenox. Turn onto the first left and that takes for to the main building. Enter and the person on desk duty will steer you in the right direction. Basically you can go any time during the day or evening. There's some confusion about the last day the show will be up. But one artist told me that if you get there by January 18 you should be OK.

Which Berkshire artist is represented in the most museums? Paul Graubard of Lenox*.

Hold your horses, Grier. A friend just reminded m about Tom Patti, the glass sculptor who works out of a Pittsfield industrial park. Patti is in a least five museums - probably more - and they are the big time like MoMA, the Met and the Louvre. Let's bump him into No. 1. Also in the mix is Michael Zelehoski, a former local artist who does amazing things with wood. He's in the Pompidou. That's good enough with fuzzy math to put him in No.2.

None of this takes anything away from Paul. He is still in the pantheon of local artists and has work in the permanent collections of the

American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, which is currently showing his work; the Waterloo Center for the Arts, which hauled away 21 of his pieces Saturday and is giving him a show in the spring; the International Folk Art Museum in Santa Fe; the Sanskriti Foundation in Delhi, India, and the Jewish Museum in Basel, Switzerland.

That's Paul (above) in his studio with his painting Red Leaves. I asked him if it is headed off to any art institution. "We're hiding it from museums," he said.

At 86 Paul, a good friend of mine, is still painting, which for him is an act of joy. Painting is the thing he turned to after the death of his eldest daughter from cancer. Something to help with the grief. As he neared 60 he decided he liked painting so much it was time to close his Lenox psychology practice to devote his time to art.

"My work comes out of a need to celebrate life," he says. You can see that celebration in this painting of Jonah in the whale, a recurring theme of his. Hungry, Jonah is fishing in the whale's cavernous craw. An optimist, Jonah has a fire going behind him to cook his catch and below that a bed for a nap after eating.

A significant part of that celebration of life is a collaborative one with his wife, the poet Karen Chase. They have a great time together. Here's a shot I took of them a few years ago that illustrates their rapport.

Here's a photo of Karen, the author of three books of poetry and three books of non-fiction.. Karen has recently been giving painting a shot.

I really liked this painting. But she wasn't happy with it and added more paint. Then she was really unhappy with it and buried it in the snow to see if a couple months submergion will help.

Back to Paul. Another recurring subject in the work is the Yiddish circus he invented. The one below is Circus Parade.

The next photo is one from his Jewish Cowboy series in which the rider, aided by an aerodynamic wind screen, speeds his delivery of "Texas Beef" to a customer. He is in the collection of the International Folk Art Museum, Santa Fe.

*Remember that asterisk at the end of the second sentence of this post, the sentence that named Paul as the Berkshire artist with work in the most museums? How did I know that? I din’t. I just took what I thought was an educated guess. Turns out it wasn't so educated.

Sean McCusker's paintings radiate with an inner heat he accomplishes by building up layer after layer of thin glazes. His 41-work show , Dreaming of Light, only has three more days to run - today, Friday and Saturday - at the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts on Renne Avenue, Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The hours are 11 to 4.

The oil painting at the top, Two for Moon, is one of the standouts in a show that can boast many.

McCusker's huddled, hooded figures, always seen from the back of side, are standins for mankind. They are often posed in ways that are stark and, to me, sad. However McCusker sees them as paintings of optimism because the figures are aspiring for the light.

The Becket artist's colors fill me with with envy. Orange is one of my favorite colors and his are amazing. The one above is titled Farewell.

In Destined, above, the figure at the top is presumably waiting to meet his destiny.

This drawing with a silver pen on black is an abrupt and impactful change from the paintings.

This photo of Moonlight is marred by reflections on the surface, but still beautiful.

Years ago I thought Sean's paintings were simplistic. But as I've aged I've started understanding that they are an an emotional examination of loss, striving, beauty, hope - in other words of a some of the most important problems we face.

I bet you can't guess who did this painting. Scott Taylor. He has been edging toward abstraction in the last year or so. Now this artist, one of the most prolific and best selling painters in the Berkshires, has taken the plunge into full abstraction. He did it at the urging of Phil Pryjma, owner of St. Francis Gallery in South Lee. Phil was visiting Scott's studio in the Stationary Factory in Dalton when he spotted some "practice paintings" the artist had been using as warm ups. I'm impressed with the four in this show, Landscapes of Our Mind.

The is Blue Eye by the amazing Brian Di Nicola. The silver section of the outer frame extends across the bottom. I managed to cut it out in my best photo of the piece .And while we're on landscapes you don't ordinarily think of as landscapes, here's a beauty by sculptor Paula Stern of Becket. The black object behind the piece is not part of it.

Below is my photograph, Occurrence. If you started reading this post on Facebook, as I assume most of you have, you're already familiar with it. One note: The blue in the top half of the picture is much darker than this. But for some reason it kept lightening up when I inserted it here.

Wisteria above is by Beverly Bourassa. It brought back memories. Once we had a large wisteria climbing up the side of our house. She has captured the plant's beauty.

This is Janet Pumphrey's lovely White Birches. I could show you a lot more good stuff. But I have to break off now to mow the lawn. It has gone about three weeks without a trim because of the heat and the rain.

I'm back from my battle with the lawn. I've had supper, watched A Very English Scandal and The Tick on TV and then got back to the blog. This tryptic has an interesting history at the gallery. Gail Gelburd's Un Bound Presence I'd guess is six feet high. Minature compared to the one Phil Pryjma had attached about as close to the interior peak in the former church's ceiling as any reasonable person would go on a ladder. But that version must have been 35 feet long and the bottom curled up on the floor.

Phil concocted a scheme to hang it higher. It involved lashing a second ladder to the top of the extension ladder he was using. But a family member wisely talked him out of it. Gail had a smaller version - the one shown here. Both use blowups of the same photo of Bash Bish fall. The photos were printed on silk and then

Gail applied encaustic - a potion cooked over a flame using oil paint and wax. The results were impressive. (The dragon is not part of the piece).

I hope you can make it to the opening. We hae company coming and I'm not sure I can.

This is my studio, located in the cellar of my home in Pittsfield. Calling it organized chaos would be charitablle. I do have paintings stacked against the walls in a way that makes some sense. And I have others rolled five and six to a Sona tube stored between the ceiling joists. In the center of the photo is my latest painting. It's perched on the eight-foot ladderI use as an easel. I used to like to tack canvas to the wall to paint. I once had room to work on two at a time. That luxury is long gone.

As jumbled as things look, conditioins are much better than last winter when I had literally run out of room to paint. I worked hard trying to restore some semblance of order.

My problem was simply that I had painted too many paintings. We figure that there are somewhere between 400 and 500 paintings stored and hung in the house. And the problem is not so much where to put them as how to get dispose of them.

As my wife says, "When we die what are the kids going to do with 500 paintings you couldn't sell in your lifetime?"

This is what I see when I turn right at the bottom of the stairs to enter my studio. The painting is The Haunting, part of my Runway series, and it makes me feel good every time because I like that painting in which the woman seems to float. The big T-square is not part of the piece.

Here's the selfie to prove how good I feel. Well I guess it doesn't prove that. You'll have to take my word for it.

I've just started painting again after several years of concentrating on photography. I eventually found that I need painting back in my life. There is a thrill of identifying problems with a painting as it progresses and trying to correct them. There are issues of balance, color, of what do I do next.

I'm currently working with pallet knives. I love paint, whether its acrylic or oil. I love smearing it around with my hands, with a block of wood. There's that exhilaration when things are going well.

I don't paint for hours every day like I used to. I can skip days now without feeling guilty. I am trying to paint over existing pieces to avoid adding more paintings to the hoard.

And here's the painting many of us have been critiquing on Facebook. This time it's upside down.

When people hear you're painting in the basement, they picture a dark, dank place. But mine is no dungeon: it has an eight-foot wide sliding door and a good dehumidifier.

Looking at this you must think I must have a hard time finding things. You're right. A long black cabinet runs the length of the recess in the wall where the black and white figure studies are displayed. Of course I can't use many of the drawers because of the leaning objects.

I'll say so long with a photo of more stacked paintings, including The Three Graces with only their legs showing and a self portrait in Level Best, a sub-floor leveler used before laying tiles or linoleum.

This portrait is by Jim Singelis of New Marlboro, Massachusetts, one of my favorite painters. This one is among the portraits he currently has hanging at the St. Francis Gallery on Route 102 in South Lee. Singelis brings a dynamic to his work that is raw and remarkable.

Singelis was a set designer for 20 years before abandoning that career in the 80s to go into computer programing. In 2009 he started painting again and I'm glad he did. Here's another of his from the show that impressed me.

His paintings, he says on his website - www.jtsingelis.com - are "histories of my interior cross-currents."

Another of my favorite artists is Linda Baker-cimini. Her drawings are wonderful. Her phrasing and her sense of humor and irony make her drawings compelling. And she sells them for next to nothing.

There are a lot of good artists showing at St. Francis now. Owner Phil Pryjma will be installing a new show July 31.

About 25 of us have been waiting 10 minutes or more in a large darkened room with thick wall to wall carpeting. For the most part we've been staring at the icy room shown above, a room with a black square cut in the ice, one end of a black ladder jutting out of it.

What we've been waiting for is the performer who will enter the room from our right and then jump into "A Cold Hole," the sensational installation by Taryn Simon at - where else - MASS MoCA in North Adams.

A tall, athletic-looking woman enters the room and walks over to the hole in the ice.

I can feel the cold radiating from the thick glass window separating us from the refrigerated room. So I know she must be very cold.

Silently and without theatrics she takes the plunge and disappears in the frigid water.

The little girl you saw in the foreground of the first photo clamps her hands over her ears as if the jumper had let out a scream. You can see the last of the jumper's splash.

She does not appear to be shivering. As in all the photos except the one of her jumping in, her face is deadpan. No fear. No self congratulation. If I was still alive at this point, I'd be pumping my fist.

Then she makes her exit through a door we cannot see. And the icy room is empty again. What a performance! I'll call MoCA tomorrow and see if I can find out who the plunger is, how often the performance is given each day, and whether they are on a schedule so you can see it too.

Taryn Simon, the artist, took a cold-water plunge in the winter of 2015. She had read about this ritual's capacity to provide a physical and psychic re-set, the museum's pamphlet on this piece reports. The practice dates back thousands of years. Among the practitioners have been Pliny the Elder, a philosopher and naval commander in the Roman Empire; Charles Darwin, the evolution theorist; President Theodore Roosevelt, and Geronimo, the Apache leader. And you may recall that Vladimir Putin chose an arctic dip in January 2017 rather than watch Donald Trump's inauguration.

The woman taking the plunge is Delaney Smith, a Williams College student and MASS MoCA employee. I contacted Ms. Smith and she said she couldn't talk about the performance unless Jodi Joseph, the museum's spokeswoman, cleared it. Ms. Joseph didn't, saying the rules governing this exhibit block the performers from talking about their experience publically.

What Jodi Joseph was able to tell me is that there are a few performances at the "Cold Hole" every day. The catch if you'd like to see one is that they come at unannounced times.

One bit of information - or possibly misinformation - I can impart: No museum in the world before MoCA has mounted an exhibit in which performers jump into a hole in the ice in a refrigerated room. This didn't come from Ms. Joseph but from my own fevered brain.

( This post about the ups and downs of the sale of Berkshire Museum paintings at Sotheby's yesterday is a continuation of a one started on my Facebook page. For that go to https://www.facebook.com/grierhorner )

While the two paintings by the Renaissance artist Isenbrant brought more than their estimated prices, two by William-Adolph Bouguereau brought prices that were somewhat disappointing. Of course the fact that any of these paintings were being sold at any price was hugely disappointing to Save the Art - Save the Museum - a group that fought the museum's deaccession plan tooth and nail. Bouguereau's Pony-back Ride (above) sold for $1.8 million. Sotheby's had estimated it would go for $2 million to $3 million. And Bouguereau's Newborn Lamb (below) sold for $975,000, well short of the $1.5 million to $2 million estimate.

Another disappointment to the museum was the fact that Alberto Pasini's Faubourg De Constantinople (below) failed to sell at any price. Sotheby's had put an estimate of $700,000 to $1 million on the piece.

I started off this post with news that Adriaen Isenbrant's The Flight Into Egypt had sold for more than a half a million dollars above the Sotheby's estimate. A second Berkshire Museum painting by the same artist, The Temptation of Adam and Eve (below), sold above it's high estimate of $200,000 when it went for $325,000.

Then there was this work by Charles Francois Daubigny that sold for $68,750, just slighly less than its low estimate.

The biggest chance the museum has left to rake in big money is from today's sale of Shaftsbury Blacksmith Shop (above) which has a $7 million to $10 million estimate.

The museum has already sold its most valuable painting, Singleton's Barber Shop. But like so many things, the museum has kept the price secret. It went to George Lucas, the movie magnate who will put it in the museum he is having built. It's price is important - Sotheby's estimate was $20 million to $30 million - because its price will be a major piece of the $55 million that the state attorney general and the museum agreed could be sold. The museum had been hoping for a bigger haul - perhaps $70 million or more.

It will use the money to implement a New Vision for the Pittsfield museum, a vision that obviously is deemphasizing art and emphasizing science and natural history. It also plans to gut the center of its two-story building to create a grand lobby open to the massive skylight in the roof.

In addition the museum was planning to set up a $40 million endowment that would bail it out of its shakey financial condition.

It will be interesting to see how the institution alots the money now that it is going to be less than expected due to the intervention of Maura Healy, the attorney general.

P.S. Here's a big one I forgot to mention, Fredrick Church's VALLEY OF SANTA ISABEL, NEW GRANADA: It carries an estimate of $5 million to $7 million. While Church is part of the Hudson River School, this painting is one of his from journey's in South America.

The Berkshire Art Association's annual showcase of college students' art ends Saturday at the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts on Renne Avenue in downtown Pittsfield. The city-owned gallery will be open Friday from 11 t0 4 and again from 5 to 8 in conjunction with the opening of the First Friday Artswalk. And Saturday it will be open from 11 to 4. Admission is free.

Ben Nugent of Lenox - the two paintings above are his - was awarded one of three Norman and Rose Avnet fellowships. He is a junior at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. I think his brooding, dark painting at the top of this post is tremendous, as is the one above with the yellow background. His award was for $500.

The top Avnet award, $1,000, went to Eli Shalan of West Stockbridge, a senior at Hampshire College. That's his powerful Exposed Rust 2. The one below is Shalan's, too.

Sophie Gerri of Williamstown also won a $500 Avnet fellowship. "Untitled, above, is an example of her work.

One of my favorites in the show is "Mason," the imposing, sun-dappled bull below. The artist is Halie Smith of Spencer whose painting "Mason" is not only very good but very large. It held the position of honor on the back wall - commanding your gaze as you entered the Lichtenstein. Halie Smith was one of six students from outside the Berkshires who attend college here. She's a senior at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Their fellowships were also $500.

Eva Henderson of Cold Spring, New York, showed several drawings of an imagined world, including Bulbhead #3, the water color above. She is a Williams junior. A friend of mine, Dorrie Silverstone of Lenox, is also working in a fictional world and I find that fascinating.

Another fellowship winner from MCLA was senior Nicole Stearns of Oxford, Massachusetts. Her bold brushwork caught my attention, as did her creation of boxes as opposed the traditional stretchers to provide the support for the paintings.

Here's a drawing by Williams senior Kayley McGonagle of Natick. She was also a recipient of a $500 fellowship. Other $500 winners were: MCLA senior Samantha White of Plymouth and Williams senior Jordan Jones of Mamaroneck, New York. In all 17 college students were selected for inclusion in the show.

Scott Taylor of Pittsfield is one of the most prolific and successful artists in the Berkshires. Friday is the last chance to take in his current show at the gallery at Berkshire Community College's Koussevitzky Hall on outer West Street in Pittsield. The gallery is close to the entrance to the BCC theater.

I'm showing you a few of the paintings in the exhibit in this space. At this point - 5:05 p.m.- if I am going to get this post in on time to be useful, I'm not going to write about the show. I'll let the paintings speak for themselves.

Scott has been flirting with abstraction in the last couple years. I planned to show you one that I tried to pluck from one of his recent Facebook posts. But I didn't have any luck at that. Apparently you can't steal everything a person posts on Facebook.

The gun-control crowd at Park Square in Pittsfield yesterday carried posters and chanted slogans like: "Hey, Hey, NRA, how many kids have you killed today." It was a variant on the classic Vietnam shout in which President Lyndon B. Johnson's initials occupied the NRA slot. And I thought it was effective in both cases.

The Eagle estimated there were more than 500 people there. It was the largest demonstration at the square the city's heart that I can remember since the one in 1968 that memorialized Martin Luther King Jr., who had been assassinated just days before.

This woman makes it obvious she wants to retire "semiautomatic politicians" as well as semiautomatics like the one used by Nikolas Cruz, 19, to kill 17 and wound 17 more at a high school in Parkland, Florida, on February 19. Many of the surviving Parkland students have been fighting for gun reform since then.

After about 50 minutes the crowd marched from Park Square to Pittsfield High. The lineup stretched all the way from the square to the high school - perhaps a quarter mile - and there were so many people it took about 15 minutes to transfer all the participants from one place to the other.

The demonstrators were packed together densely in the first third of the square.

As Shannon and I walked back up East Street, a black pickup flying the NRA flag drove by. The guy in the passenger street was shouting something. But I can't remember what.

I don't think he knew it but if this movement started by kids continues, the NRA's time as the group dictating gun policy in this country through contributions to members of Congress may be shrinking.

Think of it. There were demonstrations in 800 communities yesterday. An estimated 300,000 to 800,000 flooded Washington, D.C. In New York City 150,000 took to the streets. I have not yet seen any journalist add up all the numbers. But if someone does it should be stunning.

We keep getting storms. They call them Nor'Easters. They temporarily alter our geography in beautiful and slippery ways. When I looked from my bedroom window this morning, I decided to chart the geography of the snow in our yard and on our house.

Here's the front of the house. Look at the way the wind has blow the snow into peaks and valleys on the roof. That's my snowblower, a machine I'm in love with. It cuts all the paths that encircle the house and the places we park the cars. The path below connects the house to the street.

The swing my late father made in manual training class in Gettysburg High School graces the porch. With it's gentle motion, it's a great place to relax in summer. Babbie sits on it in winter to take her snowshoes off. To the grandkids it is not for gentile relaxation or utility. It is for rides on the wild side. The swing connects me not only to my father, but to his father and mother, who I adored and lived with in forth grade.

This is a path looking from a window on the side of the house. The mound beyond it is the woodpile and on top of that our upside down wheelbarrel.

And this is the old man of this blog's title. (Aren't you delighted that the selfie was invented?) Below is the roof after I've cleared some of the snow off, hoping to prevent melting snow from backing up under the shingles and leaking into the house. Ice dams, like the one over the gutter, are a constant problem.

I still have to use the roof rake on the addition, to the left, and on the dormer on the right. It's hard to do the dormer and the small section of roof beside it. I use the evergreen bush covered in heavy snow as a folcrum for my snow rake which has a sectional aluminium handle that can be extended to about 25 feet.

So there you have, in part, the geography of the snow at my house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

It had started snowing pretty heavily by the time we walked into the woods across from our house Wednesday afternoon. It was the start of the Nor'Easter that would drop 18 inches of snow by morning. What was left of the previous week's storm was hard and grainy, giving us good traction.

"It's so lovely," Babbie said as we left the houses behind. And except for an occasional tree rubbing against another in the breeze, it was still. We were headed for the Beautiful Field.

This is the three-plank bridge some trail riders rigged to cross this narrow, nameless stream. I only took a step or two before I found that the ridges of frozen snow on the boards were too slippery. Babbier walked a few feet upstream and jumped over the water. I followed and made it too. OK, I confess. As you can see in the photo, it wasn't much of a jump. More like a long step.

So here we are at the Beautiful Field. Me looking my age (82). And Babbie not looking hers (82). We used to dream of buying this field and building a low-lying house there with a lot of glass providing a view over the city and the mountains to the west. You can't see them in this photo because the snow is falling hard. Our house would have a barn door on a track so we could close it on nights when we tired of the black expanse of glass in the center of the house. Or when a cold rain was lashing against the glass and we wanted a sense of shelter.

You can cut across this field, as a lot of snowmobilers do, turn left at the south end and get to the GEAA golf course. It's another wonderful place to walk in winter. If you're up for a longer hike, you can go all the way to the Piggery - the long-gone farm where the city dumped its garbage which was consumed by the pigs. At the south end of the Piggery's overgrown meadows, you can climb to the top of a ridge that takes you all the way to the Mall Road.

On the way back we pass this impressive wolf tree again. The path is circuitous because large trees have fallen across it in places, forcing its rerouting. That can take you way out of the way because the undergrowth is often thick and thorny. We also pass the big hole in the ground. How it got there I have no idea. It is about four feet deep and 10 feet in diameter. In the old days it made a snug spot to lie in the snow protected from the wind or the eyes of the rare soul using the trail.

Back at the house Babbie went to the dinning room to check her iPad and then read her novel. One of my runway paintings is on the wall behind her. Eight more of the pieces in that series appear in the post below this one, as are a lot of other paintings I'd like to sell. If you'd like to see some in the flesh, email me at [email protected].

Oh, I forgot to mention that the next day Babbie strapped on her snowshoes and trugged out to the fence surrounding the solar farm. But the snowshoes were sinking deep and when she would lift her foot out of the hole the top of the snowshoe brought a lot of snow with it. They felt like they weighed "a ton." The trek back was easier because she used the holes she had made on the way out.

January 21, 2018

Never before has one of my paintings been exhibited between such lovely table lamps.

Never before have I seen such a crowd - hundreds showed up - at an art show. At one point mid-evening, cars were backed up in the estate's long circular driveway for a half hour before they could park and their occupants get into the show.

Never before have I been to a such a beautiful mansion - the new home of Berkshire Money Management. The building put on a great show of its own and was obviously a major draw.

Here we are in the big panelled room where a string trio was playing. You couldn't hear them over the noise of people talking. Another crowded room below, with a painting of mine in each rear corner.

This is Scott Taylor's "Safe Harbor." It was among about 9 paintings sold. Someone also purchased Julie Morgan's exquisitely decorated "Piano Chair," below.

Here is Allen Harris, the man who bought the old Frederick Crane mansion for $1 million and spent almost that much restoring it. Now it houses his business, Berkshire Money Management. With him is Barbara Patton, on of the 23 artists whose work was on display.

Joe Goodwin of Pittsfield is the pro who painted this abstract.

Spinning his lights this performer visited all the rooms. Most of the performers there were supplied by Atomic Entertainment, said Linda Johnson of Pittsfield, the astute party planner who put this amazing event together with Harris. There was a police car, its blue lights flashing, at the Dalton driveway to the estate to guide through traffic as well as the cars turning in. There were guys with flashlights to guide your path around the mansion and into the two large parking areas created by clearing the snow from sections of the lawn. There were kids about 10 years old serving as security inside the house. I think they were related to Harris and were thoroughly enjoying their role. Below is the restored building.

In this office a sculpture by Andrew DeVries takes center stage. DeVries shows his sculture in his own gallery in Lenox. Standing by the bookcase is Bill Schmick, a BMM portfolio manager and Eagle columnist whose office this is.

Photo by Barbara Horner.

Above is Grier Horner - moi - with one of the performers supplied by Atomic.

This is "You're Out," a painting I liked. It's by Michelle Inglesias.

Here's another painting I liked, this one by Mike Carty. One of Mike's paintings was sold, but I don't have a shot of it. In a similar vein is Ed Pelkey's commemoration of the Frazier - Foreman fight in Jamaica.

As you left a young woman in this hand-sewn costume was there to bid a silent good-bye. Like the other performers, she did not talk with the guests. So that's enough talking for me, too. The only thing that could have made the party better for me is if I had sold a painting or two. I did make money, however, because Harris paid each artist to show their work at a rate of $100 per piece. In the 20 years I've been showing art, this is the first time anyone paid me for that honor. That's a form of money management I wholeheartedly endorse.

Photo by Barbara Horner

December 5, 2017

When I woke up Monday morning and saw the fog, it created a battle in my brain. The desire to get up and take photos in the fog finally won out over the desire to stay in my warm bed and sleep. I got dressed and grabbed the red Nikon with the telephoto lens. I told Babbie I was going out to take pictures of "the tree". I walked down the hill and then up another and shot the tree so often it's trunk would have been riddled if I was shooting with a gun.

There had also been a frost, adding an icy glaze to things, like the bayberry branch below where a spider had strung its thread.

I took pictures of Queen Anne's lace, of the road as it disappeared in the fog, of lines of trees, of a solar array, its surfaces a darker shade of grey than the fog.

I had been so focused on that particular tree up the hill that I had thought she knew which tree I meant. I should explain that old women worry about old men when they disappear. And vice versa.

Next I drove downtown because I hoped I'd find the museum would be shrouded in fog. I could use that picture on Facebook to symbolize how lost the museum officials were when they decided to "monetize" their 40 most valuable artworks. I took a lot of pictures of the museum from a lot of different angles.

Then I turned the camera on this man smoking in Park Square, his smart phone in hand.

I saw a policeman pull over a pickup truck on North Street. Then another cop pulled up behind his cruiser. The pickup driver looked so dejected I felt sorry for him. What a way to start the morning.

Here is the Berkshire Museum with a tractor trailer with chefs and other kitchen workers glued to its side. It's not the photo I used on Facebook, where I chided the museum's officialdom for being fogbound. This at a time when on many days I feel a fog creeping into my head.

Earlier in the morning I had taken this picture, and many others, of Queen Anne's Lace.

And this is a shot of the road running up to the solar field built on the playing fields of what was the YMCA's failed recreational project called Ponterril. Our neighborhood, by the way, welcomed this major environmental effort to convert the sun's energy into electricity.

Bob Race of Pittsfield held the HONK sign aloft at Saturday's rally in front of the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. And that's what lots of the cars did - honk . And I mean lots.

They gave us the bursts of beeps and prolonged blares in sympathy with our support of two groups bringing the museum to court next Wednesday to try to block its sale of 40 artworks. Before the public knew there would be a sale, museum director Van Shields had Sotheby's look through the art collection.

Sotheby's experts were delighted with what they found, including two Rockwells, a Church, two Bierstadts, two Caulders, a Moran and 32 others that would make any art auctioner's mouth drool. They estimated this haul would bring in up to $60,000,000. Reportedly they wanted the work so badly they gave the museum $500,000 to let them handle the sale, The Berkshire Eagle said in an article Saturday.

"Van Shields ALWAYS HAD THE INTENTION OF MONETIZING THE COLLECTION," according to Leanne Hayden, who was the collection manager when he became the museum's executive director in September 2011. "He talked about it a lot."

This is the start of a post I haven't had a chance to finish yet. I wrote that sentence in red on October 30th. Well its gone unfinished for more than two months now. I can no longer plea a lack of time. If you want to read more about the fight to stop the "monetization" of the art, the next two posts are about it, as are many posts on my Facebook page.

Just as doctors once used bloodletting as a cure, Executive Director Van Shields and his board are draining the blood from the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. It is being done, they say, to save the patient, in this case the 114-year-old institution. I don't think they realize the damage they are doing.

In this case the blood being let is the 40 pieces of its art collection - the 40 most valuable works - to be sold this winter at aution by Sotheby's to end the museum's financial crisis.

Sotheby's, one of the two largest fine-art auction houses, estimates that the sale will rake $48 to $68 million into the museum's coffers.

One painting alone, the Norman Rockwell pictured above, is expected to sell for $20 million to $30 million.

So sell it. So what if it is one of the most valuable paintings in any regional museum's hands. So what if Norman Rockwell himself presented this painting and one other to his friend Stuart Henry, then the head of the museum. That was a long time ago and apparently doesn't count for anything. Further connecting Rockwell to the Berkshire Museum was his stipulation that if the Corner House in Stockbridge failed, all his paintings there were to go to the very institution that is now selling off his work, according to the Berkshire Eagle.

A protest movement has sprung up - I am part of it - to try to stop or delay the sale. But Van Shields and the board refuse to even talk with the group. Instead of fighting like hell to save this collection, which they should be doing, they are telling the objectors, in effect, to go to hell, that their way is the only way. Driving that point home, they turned down an offer of $1 million by three anonymous donors if they would delay the sale so alternatives could be explored by an independent panel.

What I can't understand is why trustees who may have been indifferent to the art before didn't rally around it after Sotheby's set these amazing estimates.

In 1884 William-Alphonse Bouguereau painted this lovely scene. But like Rockwell, he was out of favor with art critics not too long ago. But like Rockwell he has staged a comeback. This piece is expected to bring from $2.5 to $3.5 million. Another Bouguereau owned by the museum is valued at $2 to $2.5 million. Who among us would have known its financial value as we looked at it in the museum.

Van Shields has argued that the museum is losing so much money that without the sale it will be forced to close within eight years.

But several experts - Williams economics Professor Stephen Shepard among them - contend the museum is exaggerating its plight.

Shepard maintains that if the museum could raise $4.5 million to add to what's left of its endowment - $8.6 million - the museum could remain open without selling the art. And $4.5 million seems like too small a goal to set given the museum's intention to raise $10 million to help finance its interior redesign. Why oh why did Shields fail to launch a fund drive to save the museum instead of selling its art?

One reason could be that he isn't interested in having great art as part of the mix. Shields' dream is to make this an interactive science and natural history museum. Of the money realized from the art sale, $40 million would go to the endowment and $10 million toward a $20 million creation of a grand lobby that would rise through the handsome art deco Ellen Crane room - another mistake.

No one has shown that Shields' new vision would be any more successful than his previous vision in South Carolina, where he was head of a consortium of small museums.

There his plan was to create “an entirely new kind of institution — simultaneously a museum of natural history and cultural history... " This Museum of Life and the Environment, he asserted, would create a " 'new lens' to tell the story of people and place and the web of life.”

Shields' idea may or may not have been visionary, as some claimed. I don't know enough about museums to judge it. But as Larry Parnass wrote in a long, exhaustively-researched piece in the Berkshire Eagle on Sunday, the southern project was fraught with problems and was never built despite the 10-year effort by Shields and his team.

The Museum of Life and the Environment "crashed amid allegations of bad management, inadequate fundraising, institutional secrecy, loose spending, and an initial disregard for the archaeological legacy of the Catawba Indian Nation," according to the investigative reporter. With the exception of the Catawba issue, this list of grievances against Shields reads like those of the loosely-organized opposition here.

But as in South Carolina, the board of trustees here appears to have faith in his approach.

Shields arrived at the Berkshire Museum about a month after the debacle in the South. As soon as he got to Pittsfield six years ago, he started talking about "monetizing the collection,'" Leanne Hayden told me through Facebook. At the time she was the museum's manager of collections. And with the board's support, that is exactly what he has managed to do. I think the only thing that could stop the sale now would be intervention by Attorney General Maura Healey, whose office is looking into the issue. Action by Healey is considered a long shot.

This painting by Frederick Edwin Church should go for a cool $5 million to $7 million, says Sotheby's. I don't particularly like it, so I won't join the bidding.

This is the Shaftsbury Blacksmith Shop, the other painting Rockwell gave the museum. Sotheby's says it should sell for $7 million to $10 million.

One of my favorites among the 40 is this small one, Magnolia, painted by John LaFarge in 1860. I don't remember ever seeing it on display in the museum, but I may have missed it.

So there you have it - "it" being my opinion. I wrote it in red to put it in sync with my blood-letting analogy. I should point out that my wife Babbie and I have been members of the museum for some years and have revelled in taking our children and grandchildren there to see its exceptional art collection and other wonders. The mummy was their favorite after the were old enough not to be afraid of it. They also loved the arctic explorer's sled and suit of fur, as well as the diorama's of buffalo and zebras and polar bears and all sorts of other beasts in their natural habitats.

The museum has other art than what it is selling. My favorite is this huge and chaotic scene from Moby Dick by Mark Millhoff.

Another contemporary work I like a lot is this one of downtown Pittsfield by Gregory Crewdson. Standing in front of it is my granddaughter Riley. Now she's a freshman in college.

If I've made the trustees look deaf, dumb and blind, that's a disservice. Here's a quote from a heartfelt letter to the editor from one trustee, Joan Hunter, whose family is know for art philanthrophy:

"This is about so much more than paintings we all love. Because of the Berkshire Museum, I can walk into any museum in the world and feel I belong. I am committed to giving this experience to our Berkshire families and visitors, opening their eyes and minds with wonder, and honoring the legacy of the Crane family."

This is a list of the trustees: Elizabeth McGraw is president; Stacey Gillis Weber, vice president; Ethan Klepetar, vice president; Carol J. Riordan, treasurer, and Lydia S. Rosner, secretary. The other members are Mike Addy, Stephen Bayne, Jay Bikofsky, Douglas Crane, Howard J. Eberwein III, Ursula Ehret-Dichter, Nancy Edman Feldman, David Glodt, Wendy Gordon, William M. Hines, Jr., Joan Hunter, Eric Korenman, Barbara Krauthamer, Donna Krenicki, Suzanne Nash, Jeffrey Noble and Melissa Scarafoni.

Honorary life trustees are Michael Christopher, C. Jeffrey Cook and Betsey Selkowitz.

I consider Dudek the leader of the opposition. But it's a collective thing and he says he isn't. Save the Art, it turns out, doesn't have a president. Which may or may not put it at a dissadvantage. The museum certainly has a strong leader.

His name is Van Shields. And the success or failure of this new venture will be all his.

This is Discovery, a large oil I had forgotten when I discovered it this spring among the many paintings I store in my studio. This is how it looks at the new show at the St. Francis Gallery on Route 102 in South Lee. I love the way the gallery owner, Phil Pryjma, has teamed it with the work of Marcie Kammel, which looks like it has just come from an archeological dig in an ancient land.

This fantastic wire piece is Psalm by Naomi Grossman. She has cleverly twisted wire so that it spells out words and phrases from the Bible. This detail shot shows "only goodness and mercy" and "dwell in the house of the lord forever."

In this face to face encounter, a patrol is contemplating one of Jim Singelis's haunting portraits.

The opening was Saturday. Here's a crowd shot with apples painted by Sue Powers.

Below is Rick Costello's intricately painted work. He says the placement of each celestial body, down to the smallest dots, are astronomically accurate. Not only that, he has painted the moon and the earth (if I'm identifying the bodies correctly) so you would swear they project outward from the surface when in fact they are perfectly flat. (The camera angle is responsible for the distortion of piece's contours.)

Phil Pryma is known for the delicious hors d'oeuvres he whips up for his openings. Here are two beneficiaries of his culinary dexterity.

Here we have Jean Germain's Flight over Charlston. Jean and I are probably the oldest people in the show.

Linda Baker-Cimini engages with another woman about a few of her prints with their humor and irony. They sell very well.

These two provided music for the opening. The man on the right is Aaron Campana and the saxophonist is Frank (I forgot to get his last name.) Aaron is Ruben Campana's son.

This show is up through September and the gallery is open from 10 to 5 on Fridays through Mondays.

When I painted the Jeanne d'Arc series in 2008-9, I dreamed that it would launch me into the art world. I envisioned an exhibit at a college, a New York gallery or at a regional museum. But that wasn't in the cards.

They were shown in 2009 at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a classy North Street gallery that unfortunately closed shortly after my show there. I hope it wasn't cause and effect. And until now, most of the paintings have been in deep storage in my cellar studio. They are up during the month of August at the Whitney. No not that Whitney: the one on Wendell Avenue in Pittsfield.

They were inspired by the 1431 trial of Joan of Arc and her resulting execution by being burned at the stake at 19. The transcript of the trial is available on the internet. She was as brave and brilliant in defending herself - she was given no lawyer - as she had been in battle against the English. But the Church, as expected, found her guilty of heresy.

They got there almost by accident. Curator Nayana LaFond Glazier ran into complications putting together her August show and called to ask if I had any paintings available.

She had come to the right place for large. I sent her a half dozen jpegs of the Jeanne d'Arc paintings.

As Ghazi Khazmi, the executive director of the Whit: Leo Mazzeo, another curator; Glazier and I unloaded the Budget truck, I suggested that instead of hanging the larger paintings we just stand them on the floor. After some debate, that is what we did - Glazier deciding where they should go.

At the opening last Saturday, two people told me that these paintings should not be sold off, that they should be kept together for showing at big-time venues. Music to my ears. Keeping them - I may have no problem doing that. Only two - one large, one small - sold at the first show. Which brings me to a problem that older artists face. I'm 82. I don't want to saddle my kids with 400 or 500 paintings. It's a dilemma.

The Whit is in an old brick mansion. Prior to its current incarnation, it housed the Women's Club. The trouble with the Whit from an artist's point is that after the opening, the gallery is only open on Saturdays from 1 to 4. Ghazi also utilizes the large room for theater, opera, music, poetry and other functions.

But there is another opportunity to view the exhibit and talk about it. On Saturday, August 26, there is going to be an artist's talk in which the audience is invited to participate. Facilitating the session will be Linda Morris Kelley, who is active in a lot of good causes around town - not that this is necessarily a good cause. I've seen her in this role before at the Whitney and she's skilled at steering the discussion in productive and perceptive directions.

People attending can come between 1 and 2 that afternoon. Coffee will be available from the beginning and the conversation will start at 2.

This post contains nudity and one painting of sexual activity that may be offensive to some viewers. Consider this X rated.

You might have suffered whiplash if you had been driving past the Williams College Museum of Art last winter when Ralph Brill took this shot of Kalaisha, her arms and shawl spread like wings to reveal her nudity at Louise Bourgeois’ Eyes sculpture.

The photo, one of about 70 of nudes with tattoos, was a highlight of the opening of Brill’s new exhibit in the Eclipse Mill in North Adams on July 22. It's a classy show, something you might not expect from it's name: Tattooed Ladies of the Mohawk Trail. The Mohawk Trail is Route 2 running through North Adams climbing over the mountains as it heads east.

Paintings, while in a distinct minority, were also featured. Here is one by Jim Peters of North Adams, who studied nuclear physics before turning to the metaphysics of art.

I’m a fan of Jim Peter’s work. It’s dramatic, dark and sexy. That's him in this shot, along with his wife Kathline Carr, who is often his model. She is an artist and writer and sometimes collaborates on projects with him. At the far right is Joanna Klain, who is showing collages in the exhibit and lives in the mill.

In the hallway outside Brill's studio is this large photo of Kaitlyn by Dave Foss of Brooklyn, New York. They worked out this unusual pose to show the tattoo on her back.

This painting by William Oberst of North Adams, Moving Day, is not formally part of the current show.

in Brill's studio. I haven't figured out whether the woman's head is back in exasperation or why she's nude - or what. Are they going to pick her up and put her in the van, too?

That's Brill at the left making a point as he spokes about the show at its July 23 opening. The four-story mill

was converted to live-in studios by artist Eric Rudd. The Eclipse project opened in 2005. Brill said the show will travel to Philadelphia and Boston and possibly Austin, Texas.

It will be at his studio until November. This summer it's hours are 12 to 6 on Thursdays through Sundays. But call the gallery before you go because work often takes Brill away.

Now I'm going to show you two of the three photos I have in the show. This is Lucy posing on a cold October day at the place she and her friends call The Edge of the World. It overlooks North Adams and is just a short walk off the Mohawk Trial.

This is Cosmic Candy - a number of the models are using stage names for this show - and I took this picture along Sackett Brook at Canoe Meadows. I hadn't asked permission to shot there because I thought it would be denied. I did take one precaution though, hiring a friend of her's as a lookout. Good thing. Shortly after this shot was taken, he alerted her to put on her coat. Coming up the path a short distance from us where about 20 youngsters and teachers on their way to work on an ecology project on the stream.

Cosmic Candy, who performed in the Gypsy Layne Burlesque group, has moved to LA. My loss. She's great to work with.

This is Elena on a domineering piece of railroad equipment that reminds me of Darth Vader. It was taken by Dave Foss .

This is a print of a painting by Nadine Robbins of Milan, New York, an artist with a growing reputation and the ability to paint so realistically you think you're looking at a photograph.

There's a lot to like at this show. Here's one for the road, a collage by Joanna Klain.

Indulge me one family photo. Here Jon Bile, my granddaughter Riley's boyfriend, frames a question at the show. My daughter Shannon Nichols looks on. Jon and Riley graduated from Pittsfield High this year and are headed for college.

The current show at the Lichtenstein Center in Pittsfield features two world- class photo/journalists whose work about troubling situations conveys an urgency and compassion that is a hallmark of their fame.

They are two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Craig F. Walker, a former Berkshire Eagle photographer who is now at the Boston Globe, and John Stanmeyer. His work for the National Geographic and formerly Time magazine has won accolades such as Photographer of the Year and taken him to over 100 countries, many of them enveloped in war or other troubles. Since 2013 Stanmeyer has also operated the Stanmeyer Gallery and Shaker Dam Coffee House born of his love of social commentary and "brilliant coffee" that is ethically produced and traded.

In the one above, Walker says, "A young boy gathers as much bread as he can carry at an aid station before crossing the Austrian border outside of Hegyeshalom, Hungary. The migrants were warmly greeted by the Red Cross and volunteers from Hungary, Austria and Germany."

This is Walker again: "A woman reaches for a child while boarding a train for refugees and migrants who recently crossed the boarded from Serbia to Tovarnik, Croatia. Migrants said they were eager to move on, although their destination was not always clear. In September, the United Nations said more than 442,000 migrants, half of them Syrians, had poured into Europe in 2015. Increasingly they are seeing women and children on a route that had historically been dominated by men."

And "yes," he told me, the child and woman were reunited despite the confusion and crowding to board the train.

The photo above is by John Stanmeyer and appeared in Time magazine in 2001. He worked for Time for 10 years before turning his talents to National Geographic in 2004.

His caption: "Children 4 to 6 years old tilt bricks to their side at the GT Brick factory in Karkhla, Pakistan. These Afghan child refugees work in brick factories because they are lightweight and do not deform the still-soft bricks when needing to turn them over for drying."

He adds Personal Notes to his captions, showing that his decades of taking pictures around the world have had a deep impact on him. About this one he says:

"Have observed more than the heart can absorb. Decades of bearing witness, these three children, lives that were lost, toiling in heat rather than embracing literature and hope, scored a gorge deep within that day. Forever remembered, now for you to also bear witness so that such despair will become a legacy of our past."

Stanmeyer's photo at the right illustrates the plight of countless refugees over the years. His caption for the photo published by Time in 1994 says:

"Donning lifejackets thrown to them by the U.S. Coast Guard, 468 Haitians are crammed in the 55-foot Merci Jesus, desperately trying to flee their home. They were intercepted off Haiti's coast."

"Within the bilge of the ship was a boy being crushed, drowning in knee deep water. Hoisted by arms of the many, had it not for the astonishing fate of our patrol spotting this sinking boat...the boy would have died, the leaking vessel sinking, causing everyone to perish."

The Haitians rescued in these operations were taken to refugee camps in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Florida. Judged economic refugees rather than political refugees, they were sent back to Haiti by the Clinton administration "into a repeating cycle of despair," Stanmeyer writes.

This show, Face Them, was conceived and put together by Barbara Arpante, a Pittsfield photographer, to confront the "crises in our midst." In addition to the compelling work from Walker and Stanmeyer, Arpante has posted her own stunning work. The five-panel composition above is hers.

Gun Control is one of the panels. In their entirety Arpante's five panels, all collages, tackle problems ranging from gun control to global warming.

Roselle Chartock of Great Barrington has written a poem that sounds the theme for Arpante's show. This is the last stanza.

Arpante's show made the cover of The Eagle's Berkshires Week this week. That's her working on the placement of her panels.

Last but not least - far from least - is this forceful, beautiful piece by Peggy Braun of Pittsfield, a photographer and printmaker. I kept coming back to its wall to admire it. About seven feet long it utilizes what I'm calling photo boxes, like the one below, to give it dimension and emphasis.

And in between and beyond the three boxes are her fantastic photos of the anti-Trump rally in Boston following his election. Here are two of them.

Braun calls this work Houses of Sorrow and Voices of Hope. In a caption for the work, she writes:

"This work represents the hundreds and thousands of us who want to speak for what is right and what is needed to protect and unite us all. To participate in this very special exhibit expresses the deep concerns we all feel."

In the show, Berkshire naturalist Thom Smith draws attention to the plight of the Monarch butterfly.

Here Eric Nuciforo of Capeless Elementary School voices his dream "to stop global warming."

Comic relief is provided by photos of Cleopatra, the hog who ran away to the farm across the street and refused to come home because she became best friends with two horses there. The photos are by Cheryl Jones and are accompanied by a humerous essay by Ralph Gardner. Also on display are works by the Berkshire Natural Resources and the state Audubon Society.

The exhibit is up through June 24. The Lichtenstein, owned by the city of Pittsfield, is open from 11 to 4 on Wednesdays through Saturdays. Admission is free.

By Grier Horner