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“When a worker is killed by an impaired driver at 9 o’clock in the morning while picking up litter tossed out car windows, we have a much greater crisis on our hands.” — Garrett Eucalitto, state Department of Transportation (DOT) commissioner
SHARON — An agitated driver recently ignored commands from a member of the town’s highway department to stop during a roadway construction project. Instead, the motorist maneuvered around the work zone.
“He got angry and drove off the road and popped two tires,” said Casey Flanagan, Sharon’s First Selectman. “I have heard stories that people are speeding through our work zones, or they get impatient or agitated because they need to stop,” he said.
Just recently, Flanagan noted, a worker on the road crew reported that “somebody stuck their middle finger up at the guys” as they drove through the work zone. “It’s really unfair. They are just doing their job and they want to keep the traffic moving.”
With road construction and paving projects in full swing and following the recent deaths of three workers on Connecticut roadways in the past two months, state and local officials are pleading with drivers to slow down and pay attention when approaching work zones. Poor driving habits like speeding, inattentiveness and operating a motor vehicle while impaired are not only dangerous, they noted, but they can have deadly consequences to both the worker and the driver.
On Wednesday, July 3, there was a close call on Route 8 in Litchfield when a motorist in the northbound lane veered off the road and crashed into an unmanned state Department of Transportation (DOT) vehicle as workers were out mowing. The driver sustained minor injuries and was issued an infraction for failure to maintain proper lane, according to Connecticut State Police.
The accident occurred less than 24 hours after Gov. Ned Lamont and state DOT Commissioner Garrett Eucalitto gave a press conference on work zone safety, and two weeks after a state DOT worker was fatally struck by a suspected impaired driver while picking up litter along an on ramp in Wallingford.
According to state public safety officials, there were 14 strikes on work zone crews by vehicles during June, and 71 strikes on crews to date this year as of July 2. In 2023, DOT reported 141 crashes into work trucks, despite enhanced signage and warnings.
From 2020 to 2022, there were more than 2,500 crashes and 10 fatalities in work zones, according to state officials.
“This crisis needs everyone’s attention,” Eucalitto said. “When a worker is killed by an impaired driver at 9 o’clock in the morning while picking up litter tossed out car windows, we have a much greater crisis on our hands.”
To combat speeding through work zones, from April to December 2023, DOT ran a Work Zone Speed Camera pilot program. During that period, 541,920 vehicles were found speeding in work zones, according to DOT spokesperson Samaia Hernandez. Written warnings were issued by mail to 24,875 drivers, and citations for repeat violations were issued to 724 drivers.
The program, said Lamont during the press conference, will become permanent at work zones around the state. “We will see how fast you are going into that work site and see what you are doing on the way out. We will take a picture of your license plate and you will be held accountable.”
Speed on rural roads a major concern
Work zone dangers are not lost on town highway crews in the rural Northwest Corner.
Speed is their biggest concern, followed by distracted driving and aggressive behavior, according to highway department workers.
“We definitely see a lot of speeding,” and drivers on their cell phones, reported Russell Hoage crew chief for the Salisbury Highway Department. “They just don’t slow down.” Most roads have a 30 to 35 posted speed limit, he said, and it’s not unusual to see drivers whizzing by work zones at 40 to 45 miles per hour.
To help buffer road crews from oncoming traffic, the town highway department often uses dump trucks as protective crash barriers, the road crew chief noted.
Hoage said he is at a loss as to why some drivers fail to see the danger they are posing to themselves and to highway personnel. “I don’t know if people are just not aware of the danger, of if they just don’t care.”
Road foreman Rick Osborne, who has been with the Kent Highway Department for 27 years, said electric cars often catch road crews by surprise. “You can’t hear them coming, so they quickly sneak right up on you. And depending on the equipment being operated, it’s sometimes hard to hear oncoming traffic.”
He also noted that the suspensions on newer cars could be making higher speeds less noticeable to drivers.
Osborne said the department has enhanced its safety measures, including posting warning signs and reflective cones as far out as possible, especially where there are curves in the roads leading to work zones.
“If the cleaning crew is out, we park a truck between them and the approaching traffic, and never work behind the truck” to avoid a worker from being pinned between the vehicles, the Kent road foreman explained.
Then there are the drivers who are just plain rude. “Just the other day one of our guys waved to a driver to slow down,” Osborne recalled. “The driver stopped and said, ‘You can’t tell me to slow down or not to slow down!’”
‘Always expect the unexpected’
At the North Canaan Public Works Department, Stanley Morby said he’s seen drivers go to great lengths to get through a construction zone. “We recently had North Elm closed, and had drivers go right by the barriers, thinking there may only be a tree down or something, and they had to turn around and go back.”
His words of advice to drivers are to “slow down and pay attention to your surroundings, no different than if you see a couple of kids walking down the side of the road. Always expect the unexpected.”
Sharon’s first selectman said the heightened dangers facing road crews will spur future conversations about what the town can do to enhance worker safety.
“It’s unsafe for motorists as well,” Flanagan noted. “Sometimes there’s tree work being done, with limbs falling from a 50-foot height and somebody will run through the stop sign from the guys directing traffic. Someone can get really seriously hurt. We need patience from people.”
Flanagan suggested that drivers allow a little extra time if they are heading to work or to an appointment and expect to be traveling through a work zone. “Unfortunately,” he noted, “a lot of the work we do is between working hours when people are commuting.”
Lamont had this message for drivers: “We have thousands of people working along the sides of roads right now. I need folks to look out for each other. I need you to say to somebody who is driving a car that shouldn’t be driving a car to pull over. I need you to say if somebody is busy texting and not paying attention, stop it. We’re doing everything we can as a state to take the lead on this, but the rest really is up to you.”
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Kent painter creates ‘Best Watercolor of the Year'
Jul 03, 2024
“Empty Nest” is the painting that won “Best Watercolor of the Year.”
Provided
'This is my time,” said Deborah Chabrian, still basking in the glow of winning “Best Watercolor of the Year” at the PleinAir Convention in Cherokee, S.C.
Her painting “Empty Nest,” depicting an empty birdcage in front of her South Kent studio window, with a view of Schaghticoke Mountain behind it, was chosen as the ultimate winner in the watercolor category after a complex year-long competition.
The process saw 11,000 paintings submitted by 3,000 international artists in 20 different categories. Each month between April 2023 to March 2024, first, second and third winners were announced in each category, winnowing the number of contestants down to 276 semifinalists.
Chabrian was a semi-finalist in four of the categories. Her “View from Cabin #2,” a painting of the porch of the cabin the family rents in Maine each year, won “Best Plein Air Watercolor” in April 2023. “Gussie,” a painting of a plush black-and-white cat, won the “Best Animal & Bird” category in May 2023, and “Sunset at Kuerner’s Farm’’ won Third Place Overall in March 2024.
Thirty finalists for Yearly Winners in the different categories were selected in April 2024, and were announced at the Plein Air Convention & Expo in Cherokee, NC, in May. Her “Empty Nest, first selected as “Best Still Life” August 2023, was chosen as “Best Watercolor of the Year.”
“I’m honored to be among the top winners,” she posted this week. “I think it has finally sunk in and I am so grateful for the honor. What an incredible art experience; it will stay with me for a long time.”
Chabrian and her husband, artist Ed Martinez, moved to Kent 37 years ago from Long Island seeking a quiet place in which to work. They found a 200-year-old farmhouse and settled down to paint and raise their family. “We just bought into the whole lifestyle in Kent,” she said.
Working cheek-by-jowl, they nevertheless followed different artistic paths, with Chabrian working in watercolors while exploring her fascination with architecture and vistas, and her husband pursuing portraiture in oils.
Chabrian said she never envisioned a life other than as an artist. “I knew by the time I was in kindergarten that I wanted to be an artist,” she said. “In grade school, high school, even at Parsons [School of Design in New York] we were cautioned it would be hard to make a living as an artist, but I always stuck with it.”
Deborah Chabrian Kathryn Boughton
As younger artists, both Chabrian and Martinez did commercial work, but she confesses she never “feels the same way” when creating something on demand. Her work appears on more than 500 book covers.
“I have done a lot of work I didn’t want to do,” she said, “but we haven’t done commercial work in a while now.” Both will work on commission, however.
She said she is now “pushing a little more with competitions,” something she did not do much when her family was younger. “It takes time and money,” she explained. Nevertheless, over the years she has been awarded honors from The American Watercolor Society, The National Watercolor Society, The Portrait Institute, The National Academy of Design and The Society of Illustrators.
Both Martinez and Chabrian previously entered a competition that would send 10 winners to the Forbes Trinchera Ranch in Colorado. Amazingly, out of all the contestants, they were both among the 10. chosen for the honor. “It was the first time I was immersed in plein air painting,” she said. She says plein air painting can be “tricky” because the light is constantly changing. “You sort of have pick and choose the experience. It teaches you to see and respond in ways you don’t get from photographs.”
She says she likes to return to a painting site on multiple days while her husband is “annoyingly fast” while working in the open air.
In Kent, Martinez and Chabrian interact with other local artists, occasionally working in plein air, feeding off each other as they observe other techniques. “There has been an explosion of workshops in recent years and competitions help, too, because you see other people’s work,” she said.
The Plein Air conference was a six-day session where every day was filled with painting demonstrations and lectures followed by a “Paint Out” at various sites—the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the Cherokee Indian Village, a farm, a nocturne at the crossroads in Cherokee and at the Biltmore Estate. “It was a very stimulating and exhausting experience,” she reported.
After all these years and all her successes, Chabrian says she finally feels she has “gotten to the point where I have a certain amount of control over my chosen medium.”
It would seem the judges agree.
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Judith Singelis at Argazzi Gallery
Natalia Zukerman
On Saturday, June 22, The Argazzi Gallery opened “Looking for the Light,” an intimate exhibition celebrating the work of Jimmy Wright, an artist whose relationship with sunflowers has spanned decades.
Wright moved to New York City in 1974. Growing up gay in rural Kentucky, he wasn’t able to express himself openly, but upon immersing himself in New York’s gay scene in the 70’s, he finally found he was able to live his life freely. He began to depict his social scene, making large-scale drawings of nights out at gay clubs in unapologetic detail. Three of those drawings are now on view at the Whitney Museum, high praise and validation that Wright is giddy about in the sweetest and humblest of ways.
Wright met his partner Ken Nuzzo in those early days in New York. Sadly, Nuzzo was diagnosed with HIV in 1988 and passed away three years later. Bereft, Wright found he was unable to paint for a while, but then something miraculous occurred.
“I had no idea it was going to become an obsession,” Wright reflected on the genesis of his sunflower series. “I was a primary caretaker for someone critically ill for three years. That takes you very much out of your head and out of a studio practice.” His first encounter with a sunflower was serendipitous. “I bought a giant sunflower at the farmer’s market, and that became my first subject. Then it eventually became the only subject.”
Wright’s technique is as meticulous as it is passionate. “I work on the same series of paintings for three years,” he noted. His approach is deeply immersive, driven by a desire to explore the emotional resonance of his subjects. “I’m more interested in the painting itself, from a formal point of view,” he said. “It’s all about the ability of paint to hold emotion and communicate emotion.”
Judith Singelis, whose gallery is named after her grandparents, Antonio and Giselda Argazzi, brings a deeply personal touch to her curatorial practice. She has a deep connection to loss herself and surrounded by the images of Wright’s sunflowers, she spoke of her late husband with a quiet reverence. “I married the only man I could have married. I’ve never met anyone else like him in my life.” This sense of personal history and emotional depth permeate the gallery, creating a fitting backdrop for Wright’s evocative works.
Wright paints and draws the sunflower in all states of glory and decay. The writhing figures are infused with narrative, allowing for a process of transformation. “The work is about not only the beauty, but the fragility of life,” said Singelis. Of the title she chose for the exhibit, “Looking for the Light,” Singelis explained, “I wanted something uplifting…and sunflowers are always looking for the light. So, for both Jimmy, who just had his 80th birthday, and with everything that’s going on in our crazy world, on all counts, I thought this is so appropriate.”
In addition to having three of his drawings added to the Whitney collection, Wright recently received an honorary doctorate from the University of Southern Illinois. He is also looking forward to having a sunflower drawing featured in the 191st National Academy of Design annual exhibition this fall, the longest-running exhibition of contemporary art and architecture in the United States. As for his relationship with the sunflower, it’s changed. “It’s certainly more celebratory,” said Wright. “I think that’s the main change. The colors have gotten brighter, the expression has become more fluid. And now I’m much more looking for new ways of presenting them within the framework of formalism, composition, color and scale.” Still regularly in his studio, Wright has been working from thousands of street photos of his Bowery neighborhood in that he’s taken over the years to create a new series of figures. But, he said, “The sunflowers, I still do and will do. It’s sort of like, even if I don’t want to work, I know I can go make a flower and immerse myself in that process of making something visual.”
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