DANCE - FINE ARTS - MUSIC - THEATER - WRITING

ARTBITS by Richard B. Harper


VOLUME 6 * * All Arts News On the Web * * February 22 , 2002

STUFF YOU SHOULDN'T MISS

      ArtBits always features a calendar of the goings on of Franklin County artists. Check out these events around Franklin County. Each issue includes the entire text of our weekly newspaper column.


      Stop in for the AAC CoffeeHouses at 7 p.m. on the second and fourth Wednesday of every month. These gatherings bring new opportunities, gossip, "show-and-tell" and workshops. We come together on the second Wednesday for a booked musical performance and an art exhibit at Simple Pleasures in St Albans. On the fourth Wednesday come to the Kept Writer in St Albans for acoustic Open Mike Night featuring music, readings, and more from the best new artists in Vermont.


IMPORTANT NOTICE

The Annual Meeting of the members of
the All Arts Council of Franklin County
will be held Thursday, March 1, 2001
at 7 p.m. in Conference Room 1
at the Northwest Medical Center

COUNTDOWN TO THE HOME SHOW

      Expo 2001 will feature Art. The Rotary Club of St Albans will fill both handball courts of the Collins Perley Sports Complex with fine oil and watercolor paintings, photography, digital art, and sculpture. Artist Patrick Murphy and sculptor Dan Green are among the AAC exhibitors.


      Painter, singer, and teacher Patrick Murphy is painting a lot of barns (on canvas). His historical, architectural mood has been in the background for years; he painted and once lived in a St Albans house assembled mostly from old railroad car parts.
      "These old and often unused dairy barns have a story to tell," he said. "They are smaller and have more character than modern dairy barns. I'm also painting some churches and old granges, working on painting number ten" in the series. One painting in the AAC exhibit will be a barn on Duffy Hill Road.
      Pat was trained at the Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford University, England, received his MFA from the University of Montana at Missoula, and teaches art at Richford High School. He plays in the band Blue Sky, and lives in Sheldon with his wife Darcy, and their children, Colleen and Peter.
      "I'm more focused and shooting to get in some galleries," he said.


      Entrepreneur Dan Green is a 24 year old, native St Albans sculptor. "My goal," he said, "is to be self sustaining as an artist where I can be creative enough that it will support me." His business plan shows he will pull limited edition reproductions for sale from the original piece, then sell the original.
      "I have a rustic or a natural almost pagan style, he said of his primitive or tribal artwork." He would like to pull molds from some of the New York City gargoyles, to create reproductions "that are my size." Dan is also lusting after a 19th-Century bulldog in St Albans.
      Dan is completing a Year of the Dragon theme. He is working on a set of 32 dragons, each 18-24" tall and based on chess pieces. The dragons are cast in concrete with a stone-like appearance. He also has lines of candles, angels, and a partnership candle with two people hugging, all cast in raw beeswax.
      "All the molds are made by me in my kitchen."
      Dan has worked in sculpture at Pink House Studio for about three years and has help from the Microbusiness Development Center to build his artistic business.


      The All Arts exhibit at the Rotary Home Show opens Friday, March 9 and continues through Sunday March 11. We will raffle a well-known work by Vermont artist Corliss Blakely to raise funds for ongoing programs. Many of the works will be available for sale.


CALLS FOR ARTISTS

CHORISTER--The Girl Scout Council of Vermont is forming an all-state chorus and needs a leader for a group of girl scouts in Fairfax. Rehearsals have started elsewhere but it is difficult for the girls to travel to these other sites. The songs are simple and easy to learn. Call Dau Mayo at the Girl Scout Council in Essex (878-7131) or e-mail
      The AAC also wants to feature the Fairfax Chorus at one of our Festivals.


HOME SHOW--Have you signed up to exhibit yet? If you are an artist in Franklin County, this is your big chance to show and sell to 12,000 visitors in one weekend. E-mail the All Arts Council for the details.


STUFF YOU SHOULDN'T MISS

FAIRFAX MUSIC SESSION--There will be acoustic instruments, and (mostly) traditional music at 1:30pm-4pm every Saturday at the Foothills Bakery, starting this Saturday, February 24


ST ALBANS-- The AAC and The Kept Writer present an open mike evening of acoustic music at the AAC CoffeeHouse next Wednesday, February 28, at 7 p.m. The paintings of Alan DeMont and Joy Crane will be on exhibit.
      The All Arts Council sponsors the CoffeeHouse with music, networking time, and "show-and-tell" at 7 p.m. on the second and fourth Wednesday of every month. Admission is always free, but donations are appreciated.


CLICK HERE: ART SITE OF THE WEEK

      The first school vacation starts next week. In the interests of finding artsy stuff to do, we have developed a week's worth of assignments in music and art on the Internet. Last week, we saw that the Internet delivers audio, video, and still imagery, particularly to users with a broadband connection. Now we want to see if we can harness that technology to create or exhibit work collaboratively.
      19 Technology Innovation Challenge Grant Programs were funded by the U.S. Department of Education in 1995, including Vermont's WEB Project.
      The WEB Project is a consortium of community organizations, private industries, and schools that have promised to improve student performance in the Arts. The WEB Project's site houses both a public showcase and a protected conference area where teachers, students, and online mentors teach, learn, and critique. Hundreds of Franklin County art teachers, artists, and students have participated.
      The BorderLink Project is another Technology Innovation Challenge program. Its $9.6 million/five years span used technology in education to impact the lives of the high school students of Imperial and rural San Diego Counties. Their content plan included a mobile video production vehicle, web-delivered resources, and tutoring and mentoring by university students.
      The Arizona State University developed its Graduate Student Art Association site to foster a sense of community among graduate students and to promote their art making practices, practices that can be used by artists of any age or background. The site includes a call for artists.
      Vermont audiences, student and adult performers are often separated by distance mountains, or snow, but we now have a technological edge to bring actors and audiences together. We can use both Vermont Interactive Television and the Internet for multisite performance experiments.
      The curtain rises tonight on "the first Internet2-distributed musical" when New York University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute jointly present "The Technophobe and the Madman." The 40-minute theater off-off Broadway musical can be viewed at RPI's Technophobe site.
      The second half of the Winter break assignment is to research creating art and theater online. Could students at MVU and BFA (or in Richford and Rutland) stage an exhibit or show at the different VIT sites, or with Web Project technology, or with a video-conferencing web program such as CU-SeeMe? Or is there a better way? Check out these sites, find new sources, and share your findings with me care of this newspaper. We will collate the results and make it available at the Rotary Home Show in March.


ONLINE MENTORING

      I may have downplayed the student role last week.
      Mentors like local artist Natalie LaRocque-Bouchard view student art on the private section of the WEB Project site. She critiques, shares opinions and experience, and offers "a second set of eyes." These techniques assure that the finished work is very much the student's own vision and technique.


FRANKLIN COUNTY BOOKSHELF

      ArtBits features a quick weekly peek at the bookshelf or night stand of the folks you know in and around Franklin County. That popular feature has a page of its own at the Franklin County Bookshelf here on the AAC site.


SUPPORT LIVE ARTS IN YOUR TOWN!


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All Arts Council of Franklin County

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Dick Harper, Chair
P.O. Box 1
Highgate Springs, VT 05460
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      This article was originally published in the St Albans Messenger and other traditional print media. It is Copyright © 2001 by Richard B. Harper. All rights reserved. Archival material is provided as-is. Links are not necessarily maintained (if a link in this article fails, try Google.com or your favorite search engine).
      Thanks to recent misuse of copyright material on the Internet by individuals and archival firms alike, we emphasize that your rights to this article are limited to viewing it and printing it for personal use only. You must receive explicit permission from the All Arts Council and the author before reprinting or redistributing this article in any medium.