Latest News
“Night Drive” by Ken Krug
Provided
The title of artist Ken Krug’s new show, “Country Roads and City Streets” says exactly what it is: a collection of small, observant paintings rooted in the two places he knows best — New York City and West Cornwall, Connecticut. The show opens April 26 at Souterrain Gallery in West Cornwall, the town where Krug and his wife Liz Van Doren spend most weekends and summers. “I realized I’d been painting a lot of roads,” he said. “In the city, you look at streets. In the country, you look at roads.” It sounds like a metaphor, and maybe it is — for duality, for motion, for Krug’s own career which spans fine art, children’s books, textile design, and teaching.
The show is comprised mostly of small paintings, many born from the prolific sketching Krug does often while waiting in his car for alternate-side parking, a time sucking practice that anyone with a vehicle in New York is intimately familiar with. “I probably fill 100 pages of sketches every couple of weeks,” said Krug, flipping through a stack of sketchbooks. “A lot of those ideas came from just sitting and drawing when I’m in the car.” Other works pull from more pastoral moments — milkweed in summer and in winter, long winding roads at dusk.
What unifies the work is perhaps not subject but feeling. Krug is most interested in capturing a sensation. “For me, painting is sharing my experience of looking at things,” he said. “It’s like telling someone a story.” He doesn’t expect viewers to see what he sees. “I just want them to feel something,” he said. “Whatever it is. That’s the emotional truth.”
“City Steam”by Ken KrugProvided
Krug was that kid drawing with chalk on the sidewalk until the light faded. “I remember being disappointed because nobody had cameras in those days, so whatever I was doing was gone the next day,” he said. That compulsion to capture impermanence may have stuck. Krug doesn’t romanticize process or product. He paints quickly, often reworks pieces, and is not especially precious. “I used to do very detailed paintings,” he said. “Now I want something simpler. I don’t want to spend a lot of time because it starts to lose some of that spontaneity.”
Yet his work has endured in some surprising places. His paintings appear in the film, “You Can Count on Me,” starring Laura Linney, and he illustrated Michelle Obama’s “White House Garden,” a job that came via proposal and then, months later, a call saying the White House had chosen him. Krug has written and illustrated his own books including “No, Silly!” which landed on Bank Street College’s Best Books of 2016 list, and has designed textiles for companies you’ve probably bought from without knowing.“That’s the thing I do love about commercial work, and I always tell my students this — you know, many of the textile designs or illustrations I’m doing are not for products I like, not for something I would really want in my house. But I love the problem solving.”
“Lilacs in a Green Jar” by Ken KrugProvided
But it’s painting — the part of his practice with no client, no invoice, and no guaranteed outcome — that keeps pulling him back. “When I’m painting, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “I can fail, and it doesn’t matter. That’s what I like about it.” Failure, for Krug, is part of the process. Many works in the show began as something else but ended up being scraped away, flipped upside down, reimagined. “One of my favorite pieces in this show came out of a failed painting,” he said. “I turned it upside down and thought, ‘Oh, that’s the interesting part.’” Painting for Krug is a constant companion — daily, unceremonious, a little compulsive. “I even find myself if I’m outside, like, I’m drawing with my hand even though there’s no paper or anything there.”
“I do a lot of painting of all sorts, all the time,” said Krug, which sounds like false modesty but isn’t. In fact, Krug is already thinking of what’s next, of how the road he ran on this morning in Cornwall could be painted better now that he’s looked at it again. “Now I know what I want to do,” he mused. “Whenever I’m ready to show the work,” he said, “is when I’m kind of ready to do the next thing.”
Keep ReadingShow less
Provided
The writer Karen Chase was born in New York City but spent a lot of time living in and around Salisbury, Connecticut.
Chase is the author of several poems, stories, essays and books including a memoir about having polio when she was ten years old. Her new book, “Two Tales: Jamali Kamali and ZundelState,” consists of two narrative poems. The first is a long, free-verse poem about an imagined homoerotic love between two men who are historical figures from 16th century India, and the second is what one could call a “science fiction poem,” written mostly in free verse, and centered on a man and woman living in a dystopian techno-state a thousand years from now. Because Chase’s free-flowing poems align with “automatic” or “free association” writing, with a few forays into Dada-like absurdities, the best approach to reading them is to go with the flow.
Despite the fact that “Jamali Kamali” was written several years ago, and “ZundelState” completed only recently, the author considers them to be of a piece. Her free-verse structure offers a cornucopia of love, longing, sexual passion, dreams, art, history and science. The two stories are riveting, but absorbing the full impact of the artistry requires a big-time “suspension of disbelief.” Passages range from the lovely and loving to the jolting and violent. Sometimes things feel incomprehensible, sometimes perfectly logical, and sometimes we’re simply struck by beautiful phrases — “stinging sky,” “butterfly laugh,” or “the past shivering alive into now.”
Centuries after their death, Jamali and Kamali, whose names form the eponymous title of the first story, lie side by side in a tourist-destination tomb in Delhi that Chase visited while on a month-long residency in the city. Little is known about Jamali other than that he was a court poet and Sufi Muslim in the Mughal Empire; nothing is known about Kamali, or about the nature of the relationship between the two men.After visiting the tomb, without having any plan, Chase set about writing her story of their forbidden love, finishing the poem a few years later, after returning home.
“Jamali Kamali” is filled with details about 16th century India that Chase discovered through extensive correspondence with Bruce Wannell, a British scholar who specialized in the history of the period. What’s intriguing is the way Chase weaves these factual details together with her own details taken from direct observations of whatever happened to be in front of her while she was writing. While working on the poem in Nova Scotia, for example, she would look out her window and, noting the fog, sky, or flocks of birds, directly drop descriptions of them into her poem.
Chase writes compellingly about the deep love and intense sexual bond between two men and doesn’t hesitate to go deep into their super-charged sex lives. Chase says her fiction relies solely on her imagination, and she’s not interested in writing about herself. That imagination is enriched by a broad range of cultural and historical references, which is why “Jamali Kamali,” which isn’t written in the dactylic hexameter of classical poetry, recalls nothing so much as Homeric poetry — indeed, the name Homer appears early on in her poem.
In “ZundelState,” the second story, we again focus on two lovers who are “outsiders” in their society. Instead of being set in the past, we’re in a dystopian state a thousand years in the future, one where time is not linear, and a human being can even go talk directly with Socrates. A mysterious autocratic State that bans history and dreaming controls everything. Human beings divide their lives between the “Agora” — the public realm — and “Home,” where they are private. Home is where “people are like snowflakes, each one unique. Elsewhere [the Agora], they all match.”
A dutiful State apparatchik named Marianna feels stirrings of dreaming — and more dangerously, love — after meeting Joe, a rebellious sort. Against the rules of the State, Joe has discovered this thing called history, and walks long distances to reach “Junkyards” located deep inside forbidden territory where he forages for abandoned fragments of it.
“ZundelState” recalls the psychological TV thriller “Severance.” Both concern the “form and pressure,” to use Shakespeare’s phrase, of our times, where the techno-state, and the rise of the techno-state human being, threaten to obliterate freedom. An anxiety that human beings will eventually be emptied of their humanity hovers over both.Reading the “Two Tales: Jamali Kamali and ZundelState” drives home that our beloved humanity rests not in our capacity to reason, but in our wild, imaginative spiritedness that lives in our dreams and loves. Should these fall away, we are finished.
The author will be giving a talk on Thursday, June 26, at the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village at 5:30 p.m.
Laurie Fendrich is an abstract painter, professor emerita at Hofstra University and vice-president of American Abstract Artists. She lives in Lakeville.
Keep ReadingShow less
Norfolk celebrates Earth Day
Apr 23, 2025
A scene from last year’s Norfolk Earth Forum.
Provided
Norfolk prides itself for being known as “The Icebox of Connecticut.” It also boasts some of the densest wilderness in the state with several species of animals and plants unique to the area.
The tiny town shows its deep appreciation for nature annually with The Norfolk Earth Forum, which takes place this year April 25 to 27. This year, the forum is called “Our Glorious Northwest Corner: Celebrating the Connectedness of All,” with events centered on biodiversity, conservation, and our shared relationship with the natural world.
“The Norfolk Earth Forum brings together experts, artists, and community members to address the critical biodiversity challenges facing our region and to celebrate our profound interconnectedness with all living beings,” said Erick Olsen, Pastor at Norfolk Church of Christ Congregational, which founded the first forum in 2024.
On display at The HUB until April 30, “Imperiled Species in Our Community: The Biodiversity Crisis At Home,” is a unique exhibit on loan from the Salisbury Association that highlights local endangered species and showcases an educational poster created by the Norfolk Land Trust.
On Friday, April 25, Tim Abbott, Conservation Director of the Housatonic Valley Association, will discuss the national significance of local conservation efforts.
Provided
A screening of “A Road Not Taken,” a fascinating documentary on Jimmy Carter’s solar energy initiatives, will be shown at the Norfolk Library, followed by a Q&A session with Norfolk resident Tom Strumolo, who helped install 32 solar hot water panels on the roof of the White House.
On Saturday, April 26, the “Books & Boots” nature walk, inspired by Peter Wohlleben’s book “The Hidden Life of Trees,” will be led by Bina Thomson and Hartley Mead.
Later on Saturday, Dr. Mike Zarfos, executive director of Great Mountain Forest, will lead a walk through spring wildflower blooms. Finally, Craig Repasz from Lights Out Connecticut will shed light on the critical Connecticut Bird Atlas project and the urgent need for bird conservation.
On Sunday, April 27, families can enjoy a children’s craft workshop and learn to create toad houses, followed by an educational program on reptiles and amphibians with the Roaring Brook Nature Center.
The weekend concludes on a magical note with Paul Winter’ breathtaking concert, “This Glorious Earth,” at the Church of Christ. Winter is well known for blending music with sounds of nature, and his performances celebrate the beauty of life on Earth. Keetu Winter from Wellspring Commons will introduce the concert and speak on the concept of bioregionalism.
Visit www.norfolkhub.org/norfolk-earth-forum for more information and registration details.
Keep ReadingShow less
Puppet slam comes to Pine Plains
Apr 23, 2025
Puppeteer Adam Izen, one of the performers at the Puppet Slam, with his creation Dorris
Provided
On Saturday, April 26, the Stissing Center in Pine Plains will open its doors to a puppetry cabaret of the surreal, the sublime, and the slightly scandalous.
The Hudson Valley Puppet Slam — strictly for those 21 and over — returns after a sold-out debut in Newburgh with what Brad Shur, founder and lead artist of Paper Heart Puppets based in Poughkeepsie calls, “one of my favorite programs I’ve ever been a part of.”
Shur, a veteran puppeteer with credits ranging from Dolly Parton’s Dollywood to “American Idol,” has curated this evening of miniature drama. “We’ve been trying to have a slam in the Hudson Valley for years,” he said, “and then suddenly it all came together.” A slam, in this case, is less “slam poetry” and more “slamming together nine wildly different puppet acts,” from the hilarious to the haunting. Think of it as a tasting menu of short-form puppetry for grownups: intimate, at times intense, and perhaps liberating.
The lineup includes an Emmy-nominated Disney alum — Chris Palmieri — a handful of local stars — Michelle Finston, Cabot Parsons — and even Shur himself. “We’ve got everything,” said Shur, “from funny to profound to ridiculous … pieces with depth, pieces with abstraction, pieces with adult themes and pieces that are just plain weird.”
If your last puppet encounter involved a trash can-dwelling Muppet or a sock on your hand, prepare for a reeducation. “We’re the best-kept secret in performance,” Shur said. “But we shouldn’t be.” With puppets that range in size, material, and artistic approach — and a venue that Shur calls “a great space for building something even bigger” — this isn’t child’s play. It’s art, it’s theater. It’s for anyone curious enough to watch what happens when fabric is given a voice and an adult storyline.
Tickets are available at thestissingcenter.org.
Keep ReadingShow less
loading