‘Luminescent isolation’

“I Come from a Place Where No One Has Ever Been’’ (oil on canvas), by Ann Young, at Catamount Arts center in St. Johnsbury, Vt. She lives in Barton, Vt., not far from St. Johnsbury, the cultural center of Vermont’s “Northeast Kingdom’’.

The center says: Young’s outsize oil embodies a surreal luminescent isolation in both the background landscape and the foreground of a girl’s face. If you go in person, and linger, it may remind you of looking at “Girl with a Pearl Earring’’ (1665), by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer.

St. Johnsbury hosts the Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium which opened in 1891 as a gift of Franklin Fairbanks, a businessman, naturalist and philanthropist, to the community. His donated collections remain northern New England’s most extensive natural history display, and the National Register-listed building is a splendid example of the Richardsonian Romanesque style.

Aerial view of beautiful by remote Barton

— Photo by King of Hearts 

Escaping the heat into high culture

Entrance to the museum, which is in St. Johnsbury, in Vermont’s “Northeast Kingdom.’’ The museum and the town are very interesting places.

“We climb the stone staircase

of the redstone Victorian building,

my father, my aunt, my husband carrying our baby,

escaping from the mid-July heat.

My mother is missing, dead one year.’’

— From “Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium,’’ by Jane Shore