Focus: New Gallery Opens in Woodstock

Artistree to debut new exhibition

Focus. It’s the new gallery in Woodstock, where owners/photographers Loren Fisher and Ron Lake were welcoming guests this past weekend to their two week-old enterprise on the Green. The location is the space previously occupied by realist painter Chip Evans and more recently, a tiny outpost of Artistree. (Artistree has had to close the Woodstock spot; Focus still features some of Evans’s work in one of the gallery rooms.) Fisher and Lake are longtime photographers whose work includes some beautiful Vermont and European landscapes. Go to see the images of the New England red barns, like Windows (above), and the wall-sized lavender fields at the French abbayé de Senanque. You can browse the art and the artists’ bios on Focus’s website.

Speaking of Artistree, timing is everything. On a dubiously GPS-directed tour of skinny backroads from Barnard to Pomfret, my husband and I arrived at Artistree for the last (unfortunately) day of its then-current exhibition, En Plein Air, which included three engaging vintage paintings by Charlet Davenport, otherwise known for her sculptures and for her decades of hosting SculptureFest at her farm in Woodstock. Perhaps she will exhibit them at a future show. Next up is artist Margaret Dwyer’s Into the Woods, Into the Deep, watercolors created during her Artist-in-Residencies at Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Park in 2019 and 2020, plus some new pandemic-era works. The show starts on August 28, with a limited-attendance opening reception on August 28 at 5:30 p.m. Gallery hours Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. More info here.

It may be more commerce than art but Kiss the Cow, with its self-serve farm store, is charming, and in the most beautiful slice of the middle of nowhere. You can find the expected local produce, meats, herbs, jams and maple syrup. The surprises are the line-caught Alaskan salmon and halibut. Curious (and yes, kissable) cows observed our transactions; the chickens (below) muttered and kept largely to themselves.

( “Windows”, top, by and courtesy of Loren Fisher)
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