Spring feels like an ideal time to get tangled up in a mystery, as the snow melts away to uncover what was buried in the fall.
There’s something seductive about cozying up with a spellbinding tale that requires the reader’s rapt attention as the characters become entangled in a web of lies.
Often the best of these tales are adapted into films; it’s often disappointing to see details lost in translation in the leap from print to picture.
One notable exception is the work of author Patricia Highsmith, famous for the psychological thrillers she wrote mainly in the 1940s and 1950s.
I’ve yet to be disappointed by any of the big screen versions of her tales.
‘Deep Water’
A new one, “Deep Water,” was released on Hulu this past March. Watching the tales she crafted unfold on the screen, viewers will likely find Highsmith’s brand of suspense magnified and her characters rendered more empathetic. Dangerous games are played where the quickest hand wins, and characters are forced to consider how much they’ll compromise to have the stars align in their favor.
‘The Talented
Mr. Ripley’
Directed by Anthony Minghella, “The Talented Mr. Ripley” from 1999 is, I believe, an underrated masterpiece from start to finish. Like countless stories of suspense, “Ripley” opens on a voiceover narrating the titular character’s remorse for his mistakes. For Tom Ripley, it starts with a borrowed jacket.
The affluent Greenleafs spot Tom wearing a Princeton jacket during a concert and presume that he knows their son Dickie, a recent Princeton graduate. Rather than admit the truth, Tom plays along. The opening credits are still rolling when Mr. Greenleaf persuades Tom to go find Dickie in Italy and persuade him to come home.
After meticulous preparations for the journey (including listening to Dickie’s favorite music), Tom arrives in the fictional town of Mongibello, where Dickie’s been living an American playboy’s life in Europe. An intense friendship sparks as Tom is invited into Dickie’s dazzling world of connections, wealth and freedom.
Yet while Ripley declares them “brothers,” it’s not long before Dickie grows weary of Tom’s constant presence and makes it clear it’s time to move on. One ghastly moment of rage, and Tom finds a new use for his ability to impersonate “practically anybody” as he assumes Dickie’s identity.
The film features an all-star cast that exemplifies Highsmith’s story under the care of an accomplished director. From the breathtaking view of Italy as it might have looked in the 1950s to the soundtrack that magnifies the story’s twists and turns, this film is a favorite at my house. With every viewing, I’m tempted to tally Ripley’s lies, all the while knowing I’d lose count halfway through the film.
‘Strangers
on a Train’
While “Ripley” focuses on mistaken identities, “Strangers on a Train” (1951) is centered on mistaken intentions.
Adapted from Highsmith’s 1950 novel of the same name, director Alfred Hitchcock’s highly acclaimed film opens with tennis star Guy Haines riding the train, intent on finalizing his divorce. He strikes up a conversation with a stranger, Bruno Anthony, who’s taken an interest in Guy’s situation and offers a solution that might benefit them both.
Having fantasized methods for committing the perfect murder, Bruno suggests the idea of strangers exchanging murders — in their case, Bruno would kill Guy’s unfaithful ex-wife while Guy would kill Bruno’s overbearing father. Guy evaluates Bruno’s idea with amusement before disembarking the train, not knowing Bruno’s mistakenly taken his listening as agreement.
Visiting Guy at his girlfriend’s home, Bruno reveals he’s carried out his end of their exchange, much to Guy’s horror. Insisting they planned the exchange on the train, Bruno implies it’s Guy’s turn to follow through, lest he risk the possibility of being arrested for murder.
Like many of Hitchcock’s films, “Strangers on a Train” kept my eyes locked on the screen and, in anticipation of the darkness ahead, distrustful of any lighthearted moments.
The suspense of tracking Bruno’s whereabouts is enough to send a shiver down a viewer’s spine, and Hitchcock knows how to play with our unease.
North Canaan Town Hall
NORTH CANAAN — “If you’re not coming to work, why would you get paid?”
Selectman Craig Whiting asked his fellow selectmen this pointed question during a special meeting of the Board on March 12 discussing Town Clerk Jean Jacquier, who has been absent from work for more than a month. She was not present at the meeting.
“There’s been no reasoning, no explanation, no anything as to why you’re not here,” said Whiting.
Jacquier has worked in Town Hall since 1993 and was first elected town clerk in 2017. Conflict arose in 2023 when several complaints of misconduct were lodged against Jacquier.
First Selectman Brian Ohler filed the complaints to the Attorney General’s office, which included, among others, improper security of the vault, posting candidate campaign material in Town Hall and untimely stamping documents. The subsequent investigation found misconduct on the part of Jacquier in each of these three areas but took no punitive action.
Jacquier filed suit against the Town of North Canaan to recoup $15,000 in legal fees accrued during the investigation. The town motioned to strike the case, which was granted by Hon. Walter Menjivar at Torrington Superior Court on Jan. 28, 2025.
Ohler said Jacquier stopped coming to work after that ruling and has not been in contact since Feb. 4. During her absence, she continued to receive pay checks.
Assistant Town Clerk Marilisa Camardi had been filling in part time but was away the first week of March. To keep the office open, Executive Assistant Paul Mattingly was appointed assistant town clerk by the Board of Selectmen at its March 3 meeting. The two will work together until the next election or until Jacquier returns.
“It’s an essential function of the town to have that office open,” said Whiting.
Last week, Jacquier told The Lakeville Journal her recent absence is due to harassment and antagonism in Town Hall, which is taking a toll on her health.
Jacquier’s attorney, Jeffrey Mirman, communicated with the selectmen to request the meeting regarding her salary be open to the public as opposed to executive session. The selectmen complied.
Selectman Jesse Bunce said he has been in contact with Jacquier and he presented a letter from her to his fellow selectmen during the March 12 meeting. Ohler stated he could not verify the source of the letter, but he would forward it to the town attorney. The letter was not read into the record.
Ohler made a motion to suspend Jacquier’s salary until she returns to work. Whiting seconded. The motion passed 2-0 with Bunce abstaining.
“Every picture begins with just a collection of good shapes,” said painter and illustrator Dan Howe, standing amid his paintings and drawings at the Kearcher-Monsell Gallery at Housatonic Valley Regional High School. The exhibit, which opened on Friday, March 7, and runs through April 10, spans decades and influences, from magazine illustration to portrait commissions to imagined worlds pulled from childhood nostalgia. The works — some luminous and grand, others intimate and quiet — show an artist whose technique is steeped in history, but whose sensibility is wholly his own.
Born in Madison, Wisconsin, and trained at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, Howe’s artistic foundation was built on rigorous, old-school principles. “Back then, art school was like boot camp,” he recalled. “You took figure drawing five days a week, three hours a day. They tried to weed people out, but it was good training.” That discipline led him to study under Tom Lovell, a renowned illustrator from the golden age of magazine art. “Lovell always said, ‘No amount of detail can save a picture that’s commonplace in design.’”
Training led to work. Early on, while still a graduate assistant at Syracuse University, Howe began painting portraits — chancellors, deans, and, later, an endless roster of chairmen and medical executives. It paid well, but Howe found that the job of a portraitist, even a highly skilled one, is ultimately limited. “They’re just the same thing, you know, just a guy in a suit. Later, maybe it was a girl in a suit,” said Howe.
Between commissions, he painted for himself. This show is a gathering of those moments — studies of his wife and daughters, mythic scenes painted for libraries, and Star Wars covers from his time living near Dark Horse Comics in Oregon.A large painting, originally commissioned for a library, shows a girl in an attic opening a trunk, imagination spilling into the room. The library remodeled and sent the painting back. Now it anchors a wall in the show.
Dan Howe’s work reflects the Brandywine School’s devotion to craftsmanship, narrative depth, and a luminous, almost nostalgic realism. Like Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth before him, Howe builds scenes using light and composition to evoke mood and meaning. His meticulous brushwork and layering techniques nod to the tradition of classical illustration, yet his work diverges in its contemporary stillness. Of Norman Rockwell, Howe said, “He’s of my era, and our styles are similar. Of course Rockwell is Rockwell. I’ve got a little more painterly, Sargent-esque stuff running through mine.” The influence is there, not as mimicry, but as a quiet echo, refined through his own aesthetic language. “I’m an anachronism,” he said, without regret. His influences form a lineage of illustrators whose work once filled the pages of The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s. They understood, as Howe does, that a painting must be more than accurate.“Mood is everything,” said Howe, drawing a comparison between two paintings in the show — a couple by a fire — to an old Star Wars concept painting. “Same color scheme. Different world. Mood is everything.”
Teaching remains a passion for Howe. When he and his family moved to the east coast from Chicago, Howe taught a series at the Norman Rockwell Museum called “Painting Like Rockwell,” something he hopes to revive. “I like beginners,” he said. “They don’t have bad habits yet.”
Howe also runs a summer figure drawing workshop at HVRHS with an old-school approach. “You’ve just walked into a time machine — this is art school, 1965. Three hours of drawing in the morning, three in the afternoon. No cell phones.” His methods may be antiquated but the results are living proof that some things are worth preserving. “Maybe this stuff is so old it’s new again,” he mused.
As he hung his pieces for this show, Howe said teachers stopped by, connecting his images to their own memories. “That’s a success,” he said. “If a picture makes someone feel something, then it’s done its job.”
Jon Kopita reading between the lines at the David M. Hunt Library.
Jon Kopita’s work, with its repetitive, meticulous hand-lettering, is an exercise in obsession. Through repetition, words become something else entirely — more texture than text. Meaning at once fades and expands as lines, written over and over, become a meditation, a form of control that somehow liberates.
“I’m a rule follower, so I like rules, but I also like breaking them,” said Kopita, as we walked through his current exhibit, on view at the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village until March 20.
In 2007, Kopita and his husband, Olaf, an architect, took a trip to The Vitra Design Museum outside of Basel, Switzerland. Kopita found himself infuriated by the pomp surrounding the collection of what were once utilitarian objects, now absurdly canonized. “The irony is that a lot of that furniture was designed to be mass produced, taking really good design and making it accessible to middle class people,” Kopita explained. “It wasn’t supposed to be something so special.” Upon returning home, Kopita began repeatedly writing, “I hate Vitra” on lined paper. Channeling his frustration, he wrote the simple statement 100 times and through the act, found a cathartic release. “It harkened back to when you’re in school and you have to write out, ‘I will not speak in class’ or something 100 times on the black board.” Except for Kopita, what was meant to be disciplinary was not only a contemplative practice, but a healing act.“For me, the experience of repetitive writing became meditative and cathartic, more of an exorcism of thoughts rather than something either punitive or tedious.”
His current show at the library includes work spanning a decade, with many of the pieces created during the COVID-19 pandemic. An educator for over 30 years, Kopita found he had time and space during the pandemic to really investigate his process and to create work in volume.“I did 40 works during the first 150 days,” he said. The early pieces were instructional in nature with words like “wash hands,” “social distancing,” and “zoom” but soon began morphing into existential inquiry —with questions like “is this all there is?” repeating like a dark mantra. Some are reminders of the stark political divisions that emerged during those days. There is a tribute to the Black Lives Matter movement with names repeated in grief: George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The whole display, Kopita delights, demands something that feels almost radical in today’s digital age: slowness. “This is a difficult show because you really have to stop and process. It asks people to read.”
In many ways, Kopita has spent a lifetime questioning the boundaries imposed on him, both literal and figurative. “90% of going to school is a hazing system where you’re just learning how to write between the lines — these are the rules.” He felt the pressure of conformity from an early age. His own father had expectations for him: a stable corporate job, health insurance, a 401k. Kopita tried it for a year and a half.“It was like my boss was saying, ‘if you work really hard, you can have what I have.’” Kopita took one look at “what he had”— a suburban house, a company car —and thought, “Yeah, I don’t want this at all.” He moved to New York, got a job in a Soho gallery, and never looked back. “I know really well firsthand what it means to step across the line and try to do things differently and do things on your own terms.”
In his piece, “Transition,” Kopita grapples with the fluidity of identity, a structured yet random exercise where “he” gradually transforms into “she.”
“There’s so much going on right now with ideas of gender and what gender means, a kind of war on how people identify,” he said. “There are days where I’m 100% he, and then maybe there are days where I’m more she.” The work, much like his larger practice, is about change, about pushing against the expected, about honoring the beauty in what falls outside the lines.
Kopita is fascinated by the tension between order and deviation, by the way small shifts — whether in handwriting, identity, or thought — can carve out new landscapes. But for all its rigor, Kopita’s work is not about control. It’s about surrender. The act of writing, for him, is like a river cutting through rock, shaping itself as it moves. “I think of it as how the words carve up the paper. So, it actually becomes a three-dimensional exercise in my head at times.” It is discipline as liberation, structure as rebellion, a practice that turns the most mundane act — writing the same word over and over — into something sacred.
