The buzz about e-bikes

Shepherd Myers retrofits bicycles to add battery power in his Salisbury garage.
Copey Rollins
Shepherd Myers retrofits bicycles to add battery power in his Salisbury garage.
The rolling hills of the Northwest Corner have long drawn bikers looking for quiet roads and scenic views. Whether peddling by foot or riding on a motorcycle, it’s common to see people traveling on two wheels.
Recently a new two-wheeler has emerged on the scene: Electric bikes, or bicycles with a battery-powered motor. E-bikes offer ease of use for recreational riders and can even serve as a car replacement for the more dedicated cyclist.
The primary types of e-bikes are pedal assisted, where pedaling engages the motor, and throttle powered, which allows riders to access battery power without pedaling. Combined sensor systems have developed as a way to provide a more customized riding experience. Retrofitting standard bicycles into motorized e-bikes is another option for riders.
Several e-bike shops have popped up in Litchfield County and the state has joined in with rebate programs to fund select e-bikes.
One of the things that makes e-bikes so popular is the versatility: “Everybody wants something different,” said Bob Ensign, owner of Covered Bridge Electric Bikes, which has locations in West Cornwall, North Canaan, and Kent.
Ensign went on to explain that while some may want an e-bike to help them travel long distances, others need one in order to make biking an activity that they can actually participate in. Ensign talked about how many young people, especially teenagers, are jumping on the trend because it’s fun and their friends are doing it. He noted that for some, e-bikes have become an essential form of travel.
A wide range of e-bikes can be seen, and rented, at Covered Bridge Electric Bikes.Copey Rollins
To support the growing trend, the Connecticut Department of Energy and the Environment (DEEP) has implemented a grant program to help some people using e-bikes for transportation as a way to save both money and the environment. These rebates are available only for bikes that will be used as a primary source of transportation and have restrictions based on income level or the demographics of where the owner lives.
“It’s 10 miles to work,” said Shepherd Myers of Lakeville, when asked about his experience using e-bikes to commute. “But as long as you can plug the thing in on the other end and you have a safe place to put it, it’s totally doable.”
Myers first got into e-bikes during the pandemic when he experimented with retrofitting his road bike to become motorized.
“Most people drive a few miles to just do a few small things,” he noted. “If you just need to go to the hardware store for something small, do you really need to drive a several-ton car for a mile when you can be outside enjoying the elements?”
Shepard is not only a fan of new e-bikes, but he also believes that retrofitting an old bike with a motor is a great way to extend its life and make it more fun and accessible.
Both Ensign and Myers believe that e-bikes have very few real shortcomings. The only difficulty, Ensign said, is picking the right one, since there are a lot of options that are new to most people. For most it is best to go to a store and work with a professional to select the right bike; however, for some it may be best to look into retrofitting a standard bike they’re already comfortable with.
E-bikes are are quickly making their way into the garages and paths of Northwest Connecticut. As the technology continues to improve, it’s safe to predict that these bikes will increase even more in popularity.
Travel league baseball came to Torrington Thursday, June 26, when the Berkshire Bears Select Team played the Connecticut Moose 18U squad. The Moose won 6-4 in a back-and-forth game. Two players on the Bears play varsity ball at Housatonic Valley Regional High School: shortstop Anthony Foley and first baseman Wes Allyn. Foley went 1-for-3 at bat with an RBI in the game at Fuessenich Park.
Anthony Foley, rising senior at Housatonic Valley Regional High School, went 1-for-3 at bat for the Bears June 26.Photo by Riley Klein
Uncommon books at the intersection of art and literature.
Siglio Press is a small, independent publishing house based in Egremont, Massachusetts, known for producing “uncommon books at the intersection of art and literature.” Founded and run by editor and publisher Lisa Pearson, Siglio has, since 2008, designed books that challenge conventions of both form and content.
A visit to Pearson’s airy studio suggests uncommon work, to be sure. Each of four very large tables were covered with what looked to be thousands of miniature squares of inkjet-printed, kaleidoscopically colored pieces of paper. Another table was covered with dozens of book/illustration-size, abstracted images of deer, made up of colored dots. For the enchanted and the mystified, Pearson kindly explained that these pieces were to be collaged together as artworks by the artist Richard Kraft (a frequent contributor to the Siglio Press and Pearson’s husband). The works would be accompanied by writings by two poets, Elizabeth Zuba and Monica Torre, in an as-yet-to-be-named book, inspired by a found copy of a worn French children’s book from the 1930s called “Robin de Bois” (Robin Hood).
Pearson first encountered the world of alternative publications — magazines filled with experimental writing, artworks in the form of a book, and samizdat literature — as a young writer living in Berlin just before The Wall came down in 1989. Later, in New York City, she spent a great deal of time with artists “who were always making and assembling, whose continuous art-making made the thin membrane between art and life even more porous,” she explained.
Pearson traces the idea of publishing to a 2001 exhibition of artist-poet Joe Brainard. That show led to “The Nancy Book,” Siglio’s debut title in 2008, and she’s never looked back. The book contains over fifty full-page reproductions of Brainard’s dazzlingly accomplished and witty drawings of the cartoon strip character, Nancy. It includes essays and contributions by Robert Creeley, Ann Lauterbach, Frank O’Hara, Ron Padgett, and other poets of great renown, all thrilled to celebrate and remember Brainard (sometimes called “a poet’s artist”) who died of AIDS in 1994. Pearson said, ‘My first project with Brainard was such a good experience, I kept going. “
Since then, Pearson, the sole proprietor of Siglio, has designed, edited, and published over 40 books and other printed editions. Her books are characterized by unexpected juxtapositions of texts and images and collage-like assemblages, as well as for carefully designed and gorgeously printed volumes. Her list includes many “rediscoveries” of unpublished manuscripts and little-known publications. At the same time, she has commissioned new work from an impressive array of artists and writers such as Christian Marclay, Sophie Calle and Cecilia Vicinua among others.
Uncommon books at the intersection of art and literature.Richard Kraft
Though most Siglio books feature work by artists and writers from the 1960s to today, one standout— “Tantra Song” (2011) — showcases vibrant 17th-century Indian tantric paintings collected by poet-ethnographer Franck André Jammes, their modernist feel echoing Hilma af Klint or Brice Marden. Siglio also frequently draws on the spirit of the Fluxus movement, reissuing works by figures like John Cage and Ray Johnson with editions that honor their playful, ephemeral, and poetic origins.
Siglio also excels at photo-narratives rooted in highly specific, often eccentric concepts. “Memory” (2020), by avant-garde writer Bernadette Mayer, reproduces her journal and daily rolls of 35mm film from a month in the Berkshires in 1971, capturing the texture of each day. “Call and Response” (2022), created during COVID lockdown by composer and visual artist Christian Marclay, pairs his photographs of London’s quieted streets with musical scores composed in reply by his friend Bruce Beresford—each image in dialogue with sound.
Siglio books are sold through it’s website (sigliopress.com), as well as museum or specialty bookshops. (The Lenox Bookstore represents a number of Siglio books; the newly opened Lakeville Books & Stationery has copies of “Tantra Song.”) In all cases, Pearson strives to make “two or three degrees of connection” with each book buyer, including a “special gift” — often a piece of printed ephemera — with each purchase.
Gluck, Medallion (You/We), 1936, oil on canvas. Ömer Koç Collection.
© 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London
‘A Room of Her Own,” the exhibition of the art of twenty-five women artists working in Great Britain between the last half of the Victorian Era and the end of WWII at The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts,is best understood as a case study in what it took for women artists to gain a foothold in the male-dominated art world. The 87 wildly variegated works of art range from paintings, drawings and prints, to ceramics, stained glass and the decorative arts, with artistic styles ranging from the Pre-Raphaelites to Cubist-style modernists.
Curator Alexis Goodwin’s starting point is Virginia Wolfe’s famous 1929 essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” which argues that for women to write fiction, they first need to have their own physical space in which to write. The proposition seems close to self-evident, but when women were mostly confined to the roles of wife and mother, it was revolutionary. Goodwin applies Wolfe’s idea about women writers to women visual artists, arguing that as was the case with writers, they needed their own physical spaces before they could make art. Although some artists in the exhibition did this by carving out corners within their homes, the more driven and financially independent set up art studios outside their homes. Interestingly, only 7 of the 25 women had children.
Much of the art on display consists of weavings, fabrics, or decorative designs — forms that, until the 1970s, were dismissed in the art world as “domestic arts.” By giving them the same amount of attention as the “high art” of painting (which women were traditionally excluded from), the exhibition demonstrates that women knew how to fit art-making into their domestic lives.
Some artists, such as Mary Lowndes (1857-1929), made successful businesses for themselves. In 1897, after attending the Slade School of Art in London, she became an assistant to a stained-glass designer. She then co-founded Lowndes and Drury, a stained-glass studio and workshop, made her own windows for various churches, and became influential in the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain.
In 1907, Lowndes became a founding member of the Artist’s Suffrage League. Along with such artists as the embroiderer and fabric designer May Morris (daughter of Willliam Morris, who was associated with the Arts and Crafts movement) and Marianne Stokes (a German-born artist whose painting Polishing Pans, c. 1887 is a tour-de-force), made banners and posters for women’s suffrage protests.
The boldest and most independent woman in the show is the lesbian artist Gluck, who shortened her name from Hannah Gluckstein. Coming from a wealthy family that financially supported her art career, she was able to build her own large studio. She cut her hair as short as a man’s, wore men’s clothing, and led an intense romantic life of many loves and losses. “Medallion (You/We)” (1936) offers a self-portrait in profile that crisply overlaps a similar profile portrait of Nesta Obermer, a married socialite who was Gluck’s romantic partner at the time.
Vanessa Bell, sister of Virginia Wolfe and a founding member of the Bloomsbury Group, also shrugged off societal norms. Married to a straight man with whom she had two sons, she openly had another child with a homosexual friend.Her “Self-Portrait” (c. 1915), along with the watercolor and gouache “Design for Omega Workshop Fabric” (1913), are the most modern works in the exhibition.
My own favorite work is Winifred Knights’s “The Deluge” (1920), painted while she was still a student at the Slade School of Art. It portrays the biblical flood, but makes the arc almost an afterthought, and instead focuses on the doomed human beings frantically trying to run away from death. It’s an action-packed painting by a gifted artist who, by the time she died in 1947, had been almost completely forgotten.
Dame Laura Knight, A Balloon Site, Coventry, 1943, oil on canvas. IWM (Imperial War Museums), Art. IWM ART LD 2750 © Imperial War Museums / © Estate of Dame Laura Knight. All rights reserved 2024 / Bridgeman ImagesProvided
Painters Anna Airy and Dame Laura Knight each had long, strong careers. Airy’s two pictures from 1918, rendered in multiple shades of brown, silvery whites, and bits of red, include busy male and female workers inside the vast interiors of war-time factories. The astonishingly prolific Dame Laura Knight persisted in trying to get the all-male Royal Academy of Arts to recognize her achievements, and in 1936, she was finally elected the first woman full member since its founding in 1768. “Take Off” (1943), with four men in a cockpit packed together like sardines, and “A Balloon Site, Coventry” (1943), with a line of women and men pulling hard on the ropes controlling a humungous air balloon floating above their heads, use inventive compositions to convey the nerve-wracking physicality of the moment.
Breaking into the male-dominated art world was — and still is — a job in itself. To the women who managed it, we owe at least this belated recognition.
“A Room of Her Own: Women Artist-Activists in Britain, 1875-1945” is on view through Sep. 14.
Laurie Fendrich is a painter and writer living in Lakeville, CT. She is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow and is represented by Louis Stern Fine Arts in Los Angeles.