Jefforsonville Vermont

Well I covered a lot of miles today. I drove up to Jefforsonville Vermont to retrieve a painting that had been in a show there and to see some fall color with my family. I am exhausted, but I will write a little and then more again on this tomorrow. Jefforsonville is another of those art places that I like. It is on the back side or the northern side of Mt. Mansfield. Stowe is on the other side, and is the playground of the wealthy, Jeffforsonville is a working mans town that few are aware of. But it is where the artists have worked. As you can see on the map this is northern Vermont, almost at the Canadian border, in the Green Mountains.

In the 1920's a group of painters started coming here to paint. The group included John Carlson. Emile Gruppe, Aldro Hibbard, Chauncy Ryder, Loring Coleman, Alden Bryan, and Tom Curtin. In 1920 Jefforsonville was really out in the sticks, although you could take train there. They stayed here, at the Smugglers Notch Inn.

I took this picture today, and it is as you can see still there and running. There are a lot of really good places to paint within a short drive of the inn and many are unchanged since the days when those guys went there. I have been painting up there for about twenty years or so. I first painted there with an enormous group of artists from Rockport Mass. including Paul Strisik, and Bernard Corey, Don Mosher, Charles Movalli and his wife Dale Radcliff, Tom Sr. and T.M. Nicholas, Stefan Pastuhov and Bruce Turner and others. Some years after Columbus Day there would be fifty artists working in the area. That doesn't seem to happen anymore. I think the rendezvous got so big that it became unwieldy. But those of us who are still alive go in small groups still.

One of the artists from the 1920's group, Alden Bryan was quite wealthy and built a small museum and it often shows the work of the painters who come to the area to paint. Here is a photo of that.

It is a well lit, beautifully and inovatively designed space, with room to hang several hundred pictures. Its purpose is to encourage the artists painting there today, and to document those who worked there in the past. Here is one of the views near Jeff, as the locals call it, that artists have painted for generations. That's Mansfield in the background.

Here is another scene nearby that has attracted artists.

That is about what I am capable of tonight. I will return tomorrow and tell you more.