Take that!
The exhibit features abstract work that takes on American abstract painting through large and bold paintings that "convey a distillation of lived experience,’’ says the artist whose home is in the western Massachusetts hill town of Conway and whose studio is in Easthampton, Mass.
Talbot’s artist statement says:
“In the new paintings, I work with palette knives to quickly establish images on the canvas. I keep 4-5 large canvases open – working them simultaneously – impatient for the oil to dry. Images organically surface on the picture plane. I layer more paint and create more texture. My colors have also changed. The primary colors of previous work have been usurped by a more nuanced palette replete with earthy tones. I mix the pigment, thin it out with turpentine, and build the painting in layers. This is my evolution: Borders gone, Colors blended. The pandemic is a reminder of the privilege of being alive – my every day in the studio is charged and intoxicating.’’
'Shortcuts when they pay'
“{Lee Totman} is more than just a good farmer….He doesn’t waste moves. He is always set up for the job he needs to do. He plans only as much as his equipment and help permit. He takes shortcuts where they pay and lavishes attention where that pays better. His manure truck is an old unregistered jalopy; his equipment shed is made of old telephone poles and sheer tin.’’
-- Mark Kramer, in Three Farms (1980). Mr. Totman was a dairy farmer in Conway, Mass.
Shrivel season
“The elm leaves shrivel on the twig
and the sun beats through and our time is big….
—From “The Long Hot Summer,’’ by Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982) poet, playwright, lawyer and government official. He spent his final decades in Conway, Mass.
Laugh from the past
”They have only to look at each other to laugh —
no one knows why, not even they:
something back in the lives they've lived ….’’
— From “The Old Gray Couple,’’ by Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), poet, playwright, political speechwriter, lawyer and diplomat. He spent much of his life at the old farm he and his wife bought in Conway, Mass., in 1929. Conway is one of western Massachusetts’s “Hill Towns.’’
What a town is
“A town is not land, nor even landscape. A town is people living on the land. And whether it will survive or perish depends not on the land but on the people; it depends on what the people think they are….If they think of themselves as living a good and useful and satisfying life, if they put their lives first and the real estate business after, then there is nothing inevitable about the spreading ruin of the countryside.’’
— Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), in “A Lay Sermon on {western Massachusetts) Hill Towns’’. MacLeish was a playwright, poet, government official and lawyer.
A little jewel of a library in tiny Conway
Conway is still something of a farming community (now with lots of “organic’’ crops). But this “Massachusetts Hilltown” has also lured some celebrities, most notably Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), a Modernist poet as well as a playwright, essayist and critic, and speechwriter for President Franklin Roosevelt. Besides the area’s rugged beauty, its proximity to the colleges in the Connecticut Valley just to the east has been a lure for writers, as has the Field Memorial Library.
— Robert Whitcomb