Sometimes the title says it all.
“Cornwall Landscapes,” a collection of countryside watercolors by resident Robert Adzema, opened at The Cornwall Library Saturday, Jan. 6, and will remain on display through Saturday, Feb. 17. Painted outdoors without the use of photo references, Adzema’s watercolors on paper highlight the extremes of the changing seasons in the small northwestern Connecticut town and include notable landmarks like the red lattice truss bridge that extends over the Housatonic River. The covered bridge was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. Seven of Cornwall’s barns are listed on the Connecticut State Register of Historic Places, and Adzema made sure to include a landscape of a classic red barn and silo, darkened in shadow as a low winter sun illuminates a field shrouded in snow.
The 79-year-old artist, who moved to Cornwall in 2019, is best known for his public sculptures of sundials, including an 18-foot nautical-inspired canary yellow sundial commissioned in 1994 for Port Richmond High School in Staten Island, New York. The freestanding steel sundial uses light to mark high noon in solar time. Adzema also co-authored “The Great Sundual Cutout Book” with his former wife, the late artist and writer Mablen Jones, for Penguin’s Dutton boutique imprint in 1978. His current wife is potter Jane Herold, who has a pottery showroom on Sharon-Goshen Turnpike in West Cornwall. Her handmade dinnerware and bone glaze saucers are used at The Mayflower Inn in Washington, Connecticut, as well as notable New York City restaurants like the seasonal Scandinavian-inspired Aska in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood and the rustic farm-to-table Marc Forgione eatery in Tribeca. Herold’s green thumb is celebrated in one of Adzema’s most charming spring watercolors, “Jane’s Garden.”
“The sundials are challenging and beautiful and mathematical and precise,” Adzema said at the opening reception at Cornwall Library. “My watercolors are loose, and I need that artistic balance. There’s a great challenge in getting the numbers to work when building the sundials, but I come back to painting because it is my real love.”
Adzema’s works are done in the plein air method that many Litchfield County scenic artists are quick to cite (who doesn’t want to draw comparison to Claude Monet?). The style of outdoor painting was made initially possible for artists in the mid-1800s by the invention of portable easels and collapsible paint tubes. His one “cheat” can be seen in his single depiction of fauna — “Coltsfoot Valley with Cows” — in which Adzema relied on some bovine photography to position the farm animals in formation. Cows do not make patient models, Adzema found.
