Walking Woodstock: Into the night with George Ault

In 1935, he met a young woman sunbathing on the Greenwich Village rooftop where he painted. Long estranged from an early marriage, he later wedded this woman, Louise Jonas. Much of what we know about him comes from her memoir, Artist in Woodstock: George Ault: The Independent Years. Even seen through her loving eyes, he was a prickly, sometimes cruel man, a snobbish misanthrope who painted, read literature in the evenings, and scoffed at the world. Yet they shared an intense bond. She’d left a disapproving father in Iowa to become a writer in Greenwich Village. She revered Ault’s dedication to art. He welcomed this adoring young helper into his life. After they moved to Woodstock in 1937, she supported them for the next decade by commuting by bus to Kingston and then to Poughkeepsie to work at newspapers. It was a harsh, impoverished existence. They didn’t have a car. They didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing. They didn’t even have any art colony friends until the mid-1940s, when he finally sold some paintings.

They found their pleasure in walking. The happiest passages in her book describe roadside flowers, picnics on Overlook, and long strolls to a small plot of land on the back side of Mount Guardian where they dreamed of building their own house eventually. One of their favorite spots was Russell’s Corners, now the intersection of Rock City and Lower Byrdcliffe Roads. On her village shopping trips, Ault accompanied her to this cluster of barns, then waited for her return. He’d only go into town for haircuts, otherwise avoiding the temptation of the bars. He lingered by the intersection, she wrote, “leaning on the bridge watching the muskrat swim and parent bluebirds fly to the tree-trunk next with food. When I rejoined him he made me look at majestic cloud formations hovering above meadow and mountain; we listened to bluebird family talk, whispery-warbly, and the tinkle of the meadow brook. He studied the barns at the Corners. Then he fell into the habit of walking the quarter mile down to the Corners at night; and in the studio began painting ‘Black Night; Russell’s Corners’ — red and white barns, country corner electric light shining — the mystery and peace of nightshade.”

Between 1943 and 1948 Ault painted the scene four times. The last one, “August Night at Russell’s Corners,” is blackest of all. The sides of two barns float barely visible in the darkness. The road is a small gray puddle of pavement. Most of the canvas is pitch black. The solitary street lamp burns like a flaming white sparkler; it has the force of a star alone in a black universe. Ault jokingly called this painting a “potboiler” as if it was a film noir scene. Staring at it in the slide show light reminded me of those near-death experience stories in which people walk into a tunnel of light. Four months after he was so inspired by that August night, Ault was dead, swept off a bridge on the night of December 30, 1948 after two days of torrential rains had flooded the Sawkill. His body wasn’t found for another five days entangled in embankment tree roots. An accident victim? Or a suicide? Or both? Perhaps after losing his footing and sliding into the torrent, he no longer had the willpower to fight for his life against the chaos. He’d recently learned that they’d lost the lease on their rental cottage, leaving him despondent. Louise was convinced they were the last couple in town still using an outhouse. They’d never escape their struggles.

Yet I have a hard time seeing “August Night at Russell’s Corners” as a suicide note. To the contrary, I think Ault must have had a blast painting all that blackness. What motivates an artist, after all, but the pleasure of creation even if life is otherwise miserable? Don’t you hear glee in the word “potboiler?” To me, this painting is the fertile void relished on canvas. I decided to walk out to Russell’s Corners myself.

After 11 p.m. on a mild night, I parked in the Community Center lot on Rock City Road near Lower Brydcliffe and walked by the Wild Rose Inn, which had been the Russell farm house in the 1940s. Its windows were dark. The whole town seemed asleep, perhaps one reason Ault, the misanthrope, enjoyed walking at night to avoid meeting others. I, too, liked having the roads to myself. At night I could claim this territory as my own.

In his era the barns stood on open farmland with one dead tree trunk for vegetation. Now shrubbery crowds the roadsides. The dominant red barn in his paintings came down in 1957. Yet the newer barn-like building owned by Photosensualis does fair job of replacing it. And the white barn on the opposite corner still stands like Ault painted it. By now, I was tingling with déjà vu, or whatever you’d call the sensation of stepping into a painting. That white barn transfixed me. I’d seen it hundreds of times, yet I’d never seen it before, not like this, not lifted right out of Ault’s paintings. Who was to say this night couldn’t be 1948? I stood under the solitary street lamp — not a burning flare, admittedly, but an extra-bright version of the light above you while in a dentist’s chair — and stared up into the pitch blackness of the sky. Ault had gotten the void right. Yet this intersection was also an ordinary spot that we’ve all passed through without giving it any thought. What secret of genius had enabled Ault to transform this scene into masterpieces of American art? Might a few of his molecules still be floating in the air? I took a deep breath to savor the feeling. Then I followed Ault home.

Thankfully, Woodstock hasn’t spoiled Lower Byrdcliffe Road by installing street lights, so I was enveloped in darkness. I carried a flashlight to turn on if a car approached, but none did. I felt almost invisible, at least to the scattered window lights in the houses. Ault, I now saw, had gotten things upside down. The sky wasn’t black. To the contrary, the sky was velvet gray and amply lit by the pinpricks of stars. The pitch blackness was down here on the ground in the shrubbery and trees, the thick vegetation cloaking everything in shadows. Sure, this darkness had the potential to be scary, but I refused to give in to my nervousness. I trusted it the way I trusted the blackness outside my windows as the nourishing void. For years, I’ve been walking around Woodstock, almost daily at times, but never at night. George Ault was giving me a new town to explore. Louise Ault had written, “Although he might return from his night walks with the face of a mystic, I remember that he had said, ‘I like mystery, not mysticism.’” Let me add that mystery is the essence of life.