Cream of Vermont CD

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Song Titles & Artists:

1. Gunny Hole - Louise Taylor
2. Valley - Gregory Douglass
3. Phil Cunningham's and The Dawn - Sarah Blair and Friends
4. Count On Me - Tammy Fletcher & The Disciples
5. Down From Canada - Patti Casey
6. Close Enough - Gordon Stone Band
7. Uninvited, Overdue - Todd Thibaud
8. Stern Duo - Jazz Mandolin Project
9. Drive All Night - Rachel Bissex
10. Where Shall I Fly? - Pete Sutherland
11. The Voice Of The Porkchop - Big Joe Burrell & The Unknown Blues Band
12. Skye - The Stockwell Brothers
13. The Song Of The Vermonters - Margaret MacArthur
14. Vermont Skies - Patrick Fitzsimmons
15. The Bullgine - Wood's Tea Company
16. Sweet Dreams Melinda - Trey Anastasio
17. Tish Nign - The Nisht Geferlach Klezmer Band
18. Walkin' The Ties - Banjo Dan and the Mid-Nite Plowboys
19. Let's Not Pretend - Seth Yacovone
20. The Winter Sun - Diane Zeigler
21. Green Mountain Spring (Reprise) - Paul Webb

Featuring 21 Vermont artists, (see attached list) “The Cream of Vermont” is produced by the Vermont Arts Council with veteran singer/songwriter Diane Zeigler acting as the artistic guiding force (she also contributes a cut). Artists were selected for the CD through an open call for submissions and reviewed by a panel of musicians and music professionals. In the liner notes, Zeigler offers this – “It’s hard to know what measure of influence the Vermont landscape has had on the work of the artists featured in this compilation, but it certainly hasn’t produced a truckload of folks who all sound alike. In a culture rife with hype, the drive to ‘make it’ can become more important than ‘making’ – i.e. creating – at all. It is my hope that…in listening to this music you feel a kinship with something outside of yourself, something of the unique spirit of Vermont working through these artists.”

The “Cream of Vermont CD Project” was developed by the Vermont Council in cooperation with the state’s Marketing and Promotional Services Partnership. Conceived as a way to create a unique and attractive promotional item that could be used by all the partners, the CD will also serve as a fundraiser for Arts Council to enhance its programs and services which support Vermont artists of all kinds. The Vermont Departments of Tourism & Marketing, Information Services and Agriculture as well as Cabot Creamery all participated as sponsors of the project.

"About to Go" by Candy Barr (click here to view)

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• 8" x 10" Limited Edition Giclee Print: $50 (plus Shipping & Handling)
• 10" x 16" Limited Edition Giclee Print: $75 (plus Shipping & Handling)

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Artist Statement: I continue to develop an understanding of the unique aspects of natural light, atmosphere, and color.  Working on location, my paintings are fresh in color, light in tone, and reflect an immediate response to the subjects being painted.  Inevitable changes of light force me to paint spontaneously and quickly. 

I like to paint when the colors are strongest – early and late in the day or on an overcast or drizzly day.  Vermont offers a rich array of land and water with a broad spectrum of rivers, fields, woods, and of course the mountains. 

There is so much pleasure in painting . . . and in making paintings that bring pleasure.  Of course, the unsettled world today contributes to my desire to seek comfort in nature.  Intense observation and prolific production deepens and insures my sense of place. 

"Fred's Place" by Karen Becker (click here to view)

Available Sizes:

• 8" x 10" Limited Edition Giclee Print: $50 (plus Shipping & Handling)
• 10" x 16" Limited Edition Giclee Print: $75 (plus Shipping & Handling)

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Artist Statement: My artwork is a search for beauty, meaning and magic.  Art is my way of sharing.  I am intrigued by the exterior landscape of nature and the interior landscape of the human soul. 

I enjoy realism, abstraction, painting, and continuous tone drawings.  My mixed media monoprints allow me to fully indulge many of my art passions.  I now create multimedia artworks using watercolors, caran d’ache, charcoal, acrylics, and I have even used wild iris flower petals from fields on the coast of Maine.

A number of years ago I had to abandon pastels due to their cumulative toxic effects.  Having to find non-toxic mediums to work with, a whole new vocabulary has emerged for me.

Birds, houses and figures are universal themes.  My approach to these works has been similar to stream of consciousness writing.  The less I try to control the outcome the more of an adventure creating becomes.

I still thoroughly enjoy painting outdoors in my beloved home, Vermont.  As long as I am blessed enough to live in Vermont I expect I will never give up the joy of working outdoors and recording the beauty around me.

"Tulips by the Whetstone" by Mollie Burke (click here to view)

Available Sizes:

• 8" x 10" Limited Edition Giclee Print: $50 (plus Shipping & Handling)
• 10" x 16" Limited Edition Giclee Print: $75 (plus Shipping & Handling)

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Artist Statement: I am interested in flow, pattern and color, nature, symbol, place, and their transformations into the wondrous reality of the natural work and the inner world.  I was a childhood figure skater and later a dancer.  I am amazed to see the circular patterns of skating and the rhythms of dance in the vines, flowers, water, and trees I love to paint.  I stand in awe of the unconscious in the body, sending the movements I have absorbed back onto my canvas.

I am excited by the organic evolution in the structure of my paintings, and how that has facilitated my expression.  For a number of years I worked with the idea of near and far, of a lone apple tree in the foreground with dancing branches set against a brooding autumn orchard; the intricate pattern of plum tree branches framing the wide river at my childhood home.  These paintings displayed elements of a magical reality while staying firmly based in landscape tradition.  My teaching of Illuminated Manuscript Design gradually led me to experiment with new structures using such characteristics of medieval manuscripts s borders and an underlying geometric composition.  This has allowed me to express different layers of reality in a unified whole.  This process continues to develop and change, as recurring symbols combine and re-combine with ever-evolving movement and meaning.

I work slowly, and in a circular fashion.  After many sketches I draw the structure on the canvas, marking out the flow of the images, and begin to lay in color areas.  Starting generally with the outer areas of the painting I do several layers of paint with small brushes, becoming gradually clearer and more specific in my images as I work toward the center and completion. 

"Dancing Round the 10,000th Thing" by Lois Eby (click here to view)

Available Sizes:

8" x 10" Limited Edition Giclee Print: $50 (plus Shipping & Handling)
10" x 16" Limited Edition Giclee Print: $75 (plus Shipping & Handling)

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Artist Statement: Nature is the subject of my work.  Human Nature.  Physical Nature.  Spiritual Nature.  Perhaps because I grew up near traditional Native American art, the art of people who lived in nature yet whose art contained abstract elements, it seems natural to me to seek and express experience of nature through an abstract language.

This language also seems right for our time because what we know about nature is so much more than what we can see: atoms, quarks, black holes, dark energy, and unconscious mind.  Both nature and human nature are in a continuous dance of ends and beginnings, destruction and creativity: of movement and change, in and out of visible existence.

I contemplate these mysteries and in my working method seek to improvise a dance as well, with color, with line, with space, in an open field of energy.  I don’t understand fixed systems.  I do recognize mystery, dance, change, the essence of what I don’t know about nature and human nature. 

My work is indebted to Chinese and Japanese ink painting where I first encountered an aesthetic which values the relationship between empty space and form.  In this tradition the line creates rhythmic vitality in an open space.  I am also indebted to the improvisational methods of African American classical music, especially avant garde jazz, which calls forth rhythmic energy in the open way it explores sound.  This music leads me into new places; it encourages stepping out to my own edge.

Finally I want to acknowledge master in Western art, including Cezanne and Van Gogh, and my mentors Kandinsky, Klee and Miro, who explored imagination, spirituality and nature in their art.

I the end I cannot say that my paintings are about one thing or another.  I hope others experience them as one experiences a flower: a creation of nature that when truly seen brings feelings and reflections larger that itself.  The creation of my paintings has been such a journey for me, a way to approach, evoke, and experience creative, life giving energy. 

"Champlain III" by Sabra Field (click here to view)

Available Sizes:

8" x 10" Limited Edition Giclee Print: $50 (plus Shipping & Handling)
10" x 16" Limited Edition Giclee Print: $75 (plus Shipping & Handling)

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Artist Statement: Printmaking is my life and it has been a great ride from the time I got to graduate school at Wesleyan University in the late ‘50s where I learned that ancient art of the woodcut, to this new century where I have access to the marvelous materials and technologies of the electronic age. 

I’m convinced that the medium isles important than the message in art.  The transmittal of visual concept from one mind and heart to another can happen in many ways.  Fidelity to the concept is what printmakers ask of our process.  I love the artisanal quality of woodcut but IRIS has liberated me to express my thoughts in complex ways I also value.

"Marsh Nest" by Liza Myers (click here to view)

Available Sizes:

8" x 10" Limited Edition Giclee Print: $50 (plus Shipping & Handling)
10" x 16" Limited Edition Giclee Print: $75 (plus Shipping & Handling)

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Artist Statement: Details, colors and textures or the natural world amaze me.  Stark peeled branches in a heron’s nest, or twigs in a wren’s tiny home are sculpturally astonishing.  I find joy in a lurking pike floating in his natural element of light-struck water and tangle pond weeks; or in a chance encounter with a fox peering our of tall meadow grass.

The thread of global inter-connectedness, weaving its way through my imagery, has been a constant theme in my work since childhood, when I lived in Central and South America.  For the last year I have focused on the amazingly intricate architecture of nest and textural variety of the materials from which the nests are woven.

The image of a nest crosses all linguistic and cultural barriers.  Whatever your language – Swahili, French, Thai, Lakota – a nest conveys the message of hope for the future; of the wonder of natural things; of the tenacity, courage and drive of the small, winged creatures who build them.  These very same creatures glide over oceans, and continents stitching the latitudes together with an invisible web of flight patterns.