Gary Haven Smith Studio Tour

This past Saturday eight of us caravaned out to Gary Haven Smith's studio to see how he creates his sculptures and paintings. It was a bit rainy but that helped to keep the black flies away- always a scourge this time of year in NH!

This first image is of the outside of Gary's sculpture shed. The large door allows him to back his truck up to unload the huge rocks onto the trolley for his stone saw. You can see a new sculpture sitting at the entry.

This second image shows his saw in the background. It is about 1 story high and uses a diamond tip blade (strand). He has rails to pull stones on a trolley towards the blade. A consideration in his design is the limitations of his equipment. He can only lift the saw blade up about 5 or 6 feet so that the stones cannot be too large or need to lie down and accommodate a horizontal cut. Another consideration is that his crane can only lift 2000-2200 pounds. Eliminating weight by removing stone is imperative.

Next to the stone cutting studio is a another space where he mills metal pins for joining stone, carves slate, assembles smaller pieces. There was an amazing amount of equipment - and ingenuity on display. It becomes clear that Gary is a problem solver when it comes to interpreting his vision.

Upstairs is his painting studio which is less coated in stone dust! It was a tight space so it was difficult to take many photos without seeing the backs of all the attendees. This is a shot of the painting station with a jumble of oil paints and the encaustic medium he uses to apply them to slate and lead. It is fun to see some of his older paintings and how they relate to the most recent work.

After we were done touring the studio everyone spent a few moments to walk around Gary & Susan's lovely yard which has a variety of Gary's older and newer pieces. These sculptures benefit so much from being placed in a landscape. The light color and curvilinear lines of the stone provides a contrast to the dark green trees and grass.

For those of you who missed the tour we will do it the next time we have a show of Gary's work in about 2 years.

Studio Visit- Sandy Wadlington

One of the favorite parts of my job is going on studio visits. Artists often bring their personal vision of beauty to their homes and studios. They accumulate interesting things, have beautiful gardens and collect marvelous art from all of their friends.



Their studios are full of things too. There are often postcards, newspaper clippings and pages ripped from books that have images that inspire them. There will also be incomplete sketches or the sorts of drawings and paintings that they might never sell. This is all fascinating to me- like an opportunity to see how they think.

I visited the home and studio of Sandy Wadlington this past week to see how her show in September is shaping up.

Sandy's studio is small and cozy. It is full of the art in process. As pieces near completion they are put up on the wall for her to assess as she works on other pieces.

I am amazed at how many pastel sticks she uses. As you can see there are boxes and boxes of them. She has also tacked up paper bags underneath her work are to catch any pastel dust that filters down as she works. Pastels have very little binder in them to make them hold together or even hold on to the paper. Therein lies their beauty- they are almost pure pigment, giving a finished pastel unsurpassed color.

Sandy has also been working on a number of charcoal drawings which have the same same beautiful, atmospheric effect she gets with pastel but minus the color. For me they have the soft quality of a lithograph.

The show is shaping up nicely and Sandy and I decided on the images for the postcard. We are both looking forward to the show in September.