'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.
Telecom Reg’s Best Kept On the Books
When Connecticut land-use commissions update their regulations, it seems like a no-brainer to jettison old telecommunications regulations adopted decades ago during a short-lived period when municipalities had authority to regulate second generation (2G) transmissions prior to the Connecticut Siting Council (CSC) being ordered by a state court in 2000 to regulate all cell tower infrastructure as “functionally equivalent” services.
It is far better to update those regs instead, especially for macro-towers given new technologies like small cells. Even though only ‘advisory’ to the CSC, the preferences of towns by law must be taken into consideration in CSC decision making. Detailed telecom regs – not just a general wish list -- are evidence that a town has put considerable thought into where they prefer such infrastructure be sited without prohibiting service that many – though not all – citizens want and that first responders rely on for public safety.
Such regs come in handy when egregious tower sites are proposed in sensitive areas, typically on private land. The regs are a town’s first line of defense, especially when cross referenced to plans of conservation and development, P&Z regulations, and wetlands setbacks. They identify how/where the town plans to intersect with the CSC process. They are also a roadmap for service providers regarding preferred sites and sometimes less neighborhood contention. In fact, to have no telecom regs can weaken a town’s rights to protect environmental, scenic, and historic assets, and serve up whole neighborhoods to unnecessary overlapping coverage and corporate overreach. Such regs are unique to every town and should not follow anyone else’s boiler plate, especially industry’s.
Connecticut is the only state that has a centralized siting entity for cell towers. The good news is that applicants must prove need for new tower sites in an evidentiary proceeding and any decisions have the weight of the state behind them. The bad news is that the CSC used to be far less industry-friendly and rote in their reviews, which now resemble a check list. There is an operative assumption at CSC that if an applicant wants a tower, they must need it, otherwise why spend significant money to run the approval gauntlet? This reflects a subtle shift over the years at CSC from sincere willingness to protect the environment toward minimal tweaking of bad applications with minor changes. The bottom line is that towns really cannot rely on the CSC to do all the work for them.
What CSC issues telecom providers is a “certificate of environmental compatibility” after an evidentiary proceeding (not unlike a court case) with intervenors, parties, expert witnesses, and the service provider’s technical pro’s sworn in and subject to cross examination. Service providers get to do the same with any opposition from intervenor/party participants – like towns and citizens -- and their experts. It’s an impressive process whose ultimate goal is the fine balancing between allowing adequate/reliable public services and protecting state ecology with minimal damage to scenic, historic, and recreational values. They unfortunately often fall short of their mandate – like approving cell towers with diesel generators over town aquifers -- evidenced by CSC only rejecting about five cell towers in the past 15-20 years.
The CSC was founded in 1972 and clarified its mission in the 1980’s to prevent the state from being carved up willy-nilly by gas pipelines, high tension corridors, and broadcast towers. With the sudden proliferation of cell towers beginning in late 1990’s, it became the most sued agency in Connecticut by both an arrogant upstart industry if applications were denied and by towns/citizens when bad sites were forced on them. CSC gradually formed a defensive posture that drives their decisions toward industry with deeper pockets and attorneys on retainer.
For citizens, nothing can wreck one’s day like the CSC. It behooves towns to protect what little toolkit they have, and understand the legal parameters of the CSC’s playing field. The CSC is not a “normal” government agency where municipal/citizen redress is based on logic and local support. Their process is largely immune to everything but specific kinds of evidence – like town regs with setbacks/fall zones, radio frequency transmission signal strengths, sensitive areas identified, and detailed wildlife inventory, among others.
There is a current cell tower fight involving two intervening towns -- Washington and Warren; both with good cell tower regs – over a tower site within 1200’ of a Montessori School, near Steep Rock’s nature preserves with comprehensive geology/wildlife databases that include endangered, threatened and special concern flora and fauna, on established federal/state migratory bird flyways, within throwing distance to a historic site capable of being listed on the Underground Railroad, and with an access road on a blind curve entering a state highway that will permanently damage wetlands, vernal pools, and core forests. There are well credentialed environmental experts, including Dr. Michael Klemens, former chair of Salisbury’s P&Z, as well as the former director of migratory bird management at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and an RF engineer testifying to alternative approaches, plus three attorneys representing intervenors. It is the most professional challenge I have seen at CSC since Falls Village successfully mounted one that protected Robbins Swamps several years ago.
The hearing is ongoing, with uncertain results. To see what it takes today to stop an inappropriate tower siting, see Docket #543 under “Pending Matters” at https://portal.ct.gov/csc before removing local cell tower regs – the lowest hanging fruit that any town can possess in case it’s needed.
B, Blake Levitt is the Communications Director at The Berkshire-Litchfield Environmental Council. She writes about how technology affects biology.