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Dan Howe’s time machine
Mar 12, 2025
Dan Howe at the Kearcher-Monsell Gallery at Housatonic Valley Regional High School.
Natalia Zukerman
“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.”
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Jon Kopita reading between the lines at the David M. Hunt Library.
Natalia Zukerman
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.
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Jesse Ofgang and Kevin Elam bring Celtic thunder to the Library Annex on a stormy evening
Mar 12, 2025
Kevin Elam, left, and Jesse Ofgang, right, entertained guests at the NorthEast-Millerton Library Annex on March 5 with an array of Irish and Scottish musical fare.
Krista A. Briggs
Acclaimed Irish flutist Desi Wilkinson advises musicians to “Play only tunes and songs you’re mad about … Emulate what you like and then do your thing.” It’s advice Jesse Ofgang and Kevin Elam have seemingly taken to heart as part of their “Prelude to St. Patrick’s Day” tour which landed at the NorthEast-Millerton Library Annex on March 5, where the Celtic-flavored duo found themselves playing to a nearly full house on a wet and windy Wednesday.
While neither Ofgang nor Elam is originally from Ireland, their musical souls are firmly connected to both the Emerald Isle and the Highlands. While Ofgang claims partial Irish heritage through his mother and believes his musical partner is not of Irish descent, Elam’s resumé is filled with accomplishments in Irish music. He took top prize in 2019 in men’s English singing at the Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann competition in Drogheda, Ireland and has medaled at both the All-Ireland Fleadh and CCE Mid-Atlantic Fleadh competitions. Despite his Irish roots, Ofgang’s musical focus is actually across the Irish Sea, where he earned a master’s degree in Scottish music and bagpipes. As a student, he performed with the 16-time world champion Shotts and Dykehead Caledonia Pipe Band.
Both musicians are multi-instrumentalists. Elam, the duo’s vocalist, is skilled in tin whistle, bouzouki, banjo, mandolin and guitar while Ofgang, a bagpiper, has mastered uilleann pipes and border pipes as well as the Irish flute and whistles, organ, guitar and piano. In addition to touring — together and separately — Ofgang and Elam both provide instruction to students in musical instrumentation.
“Prelude to St. Patrick’s Day,” which wrapped up on March 9 in Middletown, Connecticut, featured an array of Celtic tunes and songs. According to Ofgang, there’s a difference between the two. By definition, songs include lyrics and tunes consist strictly of music. Ofgang and Elam included both in their hour-long set at the Library Annex, which began with “The Foggy Dew,” a song lamenting Ireland’s political divide and the resulting violence of the Easter uprising, which was followed by a jig, “The Road to Lisdoonvarna.”
“Rocky Road to Dublin” drew an enthusiastic response from the crowd as did the folk song, “The Lakes of Pontchartrain,” which Elam and Ofgang introduced as a song about alligators. The ballad is actually of unknown origin and its subject matter centers on a Creole woman and the unrequited love a drifter holds for her in the Deep South. The duo believes the song may very well have been penned by an Irish immigrant to the United States.
Elam and Ofgang invited the crowd to join them in “The King’s Shilling,” another song exploring the realities of war with its introspective chorus “Come ladies, come. Hear the cannons roar. Take the King’s shilling and we’re off to war.”
The duo then segued over to Scottish fare with the audience joining in once more for “Auld Lang Syne,” traditionally sung on New Year’s Eve, but the song is also used to close out occasions — ver as the evening slowly wound down. Ofgang, assisted by Elam, then wrapped up the night with traditional Scottish bagpipes, a worthy overture to St. Patrick’s Day 2025.
The concert was sponsored by the Ann and Abe Effron Donor Advised Fund of the Community Foundations of the Hudson Valley. Library director Rhiannon Leo-Jameson said the library is looking into additional grants to fund further programming for community enjoyment. For more information, visit nemillertonlibrary.org.
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