In a second showroom, he displayed and demonstrated his “duck and feel” pieces, including “Spiral Run,” a skinny, twisting paddle-like piece of exquisitely carved mahogany that’s meant to be touched, with eyes closed; the pieces will go on display at a Hudson gallery in September and be placed in a back room especially designed for blind people, Neumann said.
A few doors away, Christopher Nealon was sitting with two friends in his spare, cavernous studio, a former Pontiac dealership garage, where he carves and welds for his narrative assemblages. Lying on the concrete floor was a large boulder strangely hollowed out and sliced in two; it was reassembled with a light shining through the crevice of the two halves. The stone had been transformed into a cave, its inverse, while still retaining its identity as boulder, setting up an ambiguous tension.
Nealon’s other works, utilizing metal, wood, and found objects, were positioned along the far wall. One piece, a charred kitchen chair with a can balanced on the seat emitting a candle flame, had been attached to a rectangular metal plinth on the wall; it had a morbid, theatrical flair and illustrated Nealon’s penchant for incorporating literal lights in his work.
Next I headed out to the cluster of studios bordering Fish Creek Rd. First stop was Hugh Morris and Viorica Stan, who share studio space on High Woods Rd.; her mixed media drawings and paintings and his theatrically themed paintings, which incorporate the frames, often tilted and otherwise integrated into the painted illusion, were exhibited in opposite walls of a white tent. Morris painted scenery for many years for New York’s Public Theater, including huge set pieces for Shakespearean plays performed in Central Park. For each performance he made a painting that was hung in the actors’ green room, an homage to their dedication; some of these, a few with Shakespearian themes, were on display. Morris’ illusory magic was particularly evident on a black-painted faux laptop, its “screen” depicting two hands grasping an apple, which on second glance was the Apple logo. The prop accompanied monologist Mike Daisey’s piece “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.”
Besides paintings and drawings of trees, fantasy landscapes and figures, Stan also displayed her inventive photography. Many pieces consisted of images of flowers, butterflies, and other nature motifs developed through the use of sunlight, without film, while her latest work consisted of vividly colored images of stream surfaces and other nature imagery that looked manipulated, but weren’t.
Down the road a bit, Tad Richards, whose studio consists of the preserved home and workplace of his stepfather Harvey Fite, creator of Opus 40, has made the computer an intrinsic part of his art practice, though you wouldn’t know it by looking at his work. He creates his pointillist, delicately toned, French-looking nudes, still-lifes and landscapes using Microsoft Paint for the XP system, a program he likes because of the subtle tonal variations he can achieve. Richards also draws and paints portraits of jazz musicians on the computer, works that have a calligraphic freshness. While I munched on a muffin, Tad talked about the romance between Fite and Tad’s mother — a framed black-and-white photo of the stunningly attractive couple taken for Life magazine in the 1940s hung on the wall — and how Fite’s painstaking excavation work in the quarry crafting his monumental sculptural site, which Tad witnessed first-hand as a boy, had served as an inspiration. The rough board-sided room with the picture window, floor-to-ceiling books, and high ceilings has been preserved intact by Richards (the adjacent Opus 40 site is owned by a nonprofit), who also writes novels and poetry. A little girl on the tour asked Richards, “Are you a poet?” When he said yes, she said, “Tell me one of your poems,” and he promised to find one and read it to her.
Long shadows were falling over Opus 40 and the spacious lawn and parking area around Richards’ house, still decorated with the mysterious, hunched stone figures carved by Fite, when I drove away and headed for my next and last stop, the ceramic studio of Marsha Kaufman-Rubinstein. I drove past a series of gorgeous fields, part of the property owned by Kaufman-Rubinstein and her husband, Scott Rubinstein, co-director of the Woodstock-New Paltz Art & Crafts Fair, before dead-ending at the studio, larger than a double-car garage and fronted by some tall Hawaiian ginger plants in pots. Kaufman-Rubinstein was working in her vegetable garden and gave me a tomato as she strolled over to show me around. Her porcelain pieces consist of lamp bases, bowls, plates, animal figurines and other objects, many delicately etched in floral designs; the artist said she’d had an excellent turnout that day, with substantial sales. She showed me the “greenware” on shelves waiting to be painted, etched, fired, dipped in glaze, and fired again, explaining the lengthy process of making her wares.
“It’s just wonderful in all ways,” she said of the tour. “I met a wonderful family driving from Chicago today. I get people from New York City and international visitors as well as people from around the corner. A lot are return customers. It’s rather spectacular.”
Heading back to the village, a few chickens strutted along the side of the road, and I marveled at so much unspoiled countryside and so much art-making. Thanks to the efforts of organizer Barbara Bravo, whose sculptural tiles and pottery studio on old Rt. 32 I unfortunately did not get to, the tour is an effortless trek for the visitor, with well-marked, free maps available at various accessible places in the village and detailed descriptions of each artist, both on the map and on the Internet site. If there was one criticism I heard, it is that most of the artists are over 60, and that a younger, edgier cohort would be welcome. Whatever. There’s no doubt there’s no more intimate, interesting way to get to know Saugerties than by attending the tour.
