New Hampshire & Maine

Last weekend on Saturday we drove two towns west to Newport, NH.  This year was their 40th annual Apple Pie Fair.  An early harvest fair of sorts.

The red striped tent held the home made apple pies for sale.  They were sold out by the time we got there, though we did manage to get a piece of apple crumble (à la mode) at another tent.

 The town green is flat, rectangular, and grassy.  There’s a art/craft/farmer’s market there every week in the summer, and it’s also a place for wintertime fun as seen in this drawing from an earlier blog.

 The Civil War statue in the center of the green is unusually tall and ornate. It was erected in 1912, about forty years after the end of the terrible conflict.  And two years before the next.

The white painted church at the far end was originally brown shingled as was once very fashionable.  Actually the style is returning to favor.

Sue’s Sea Food is located in Kittery, Maine, just across the Piscataqua River from New Hampshire. We usually buy lunch there, lobster rolls always, when we are in the area.

The roof line looks odd if you have never seen this type of building before.  The two side wings on the roof are called dormers, meant to provide extra room and sunlight to the bedrooms.

Sue’s bearded husband sits on the bench.

I was asked as a special favor to draw the Lion’s Club popcorn cart in Goffstown, NH.  (The Lion’s Club is one of many nationwide service organizations, largely composed of business people in the town.)  The cart was built in 1930. Think about this...a popcorn cart built the year after the stock market crashed.  Perhaps it was built to bring some small inexpensive cheer to all.  And to raise money too?  And it was moved from place to place too.

  My family always stopped for popcorn from either this cart or its twin in Manchester, NH during our long car trips from Massachusetts.  We were headed north to see our grandparents in Concord, and there weren’t any superhighways back then. And we needed a treat along the way.  The cart I recall was gas fired and made a wonderful crackly sound.  We knew we were close by the scent alone.

A gardener in Goffstown has a sense of humor. The yellow marigold flowers growing out of the stone trough are round and puffy and shaped like popcorn.

I sat on the soft grass to draw the flowers in the cutting garden of the New London Historical Society in our town.  They are tended by several members and are used for floral arrangements when needed.

We were seated under our vendor’s tent at the recent Artisan’s Weekend at our town’s Historical Society.  The crowds were thin, and I had plenty of time to gaze around and sketch.  I saw the copper weathervane neatly framed in the rigging of our tent signs. 

This little pond is close by to our house, and we pass it daily.  When the sun is out, one little turtle sits on the rock.  I always look to the right to see if he/she is there. 

These are the front doors of the Deering, NH Town Hall, erected in 1788.  From 1788 to 1829 the building was used as a meeting house for both civic and religious groups.  In 1819, New Hampshire passed the Toleration Act which required the separation of church and state.  Which meant that the Congregational Church members were required to build their own building.  Completed in 1830, the church sits across the road. 

 The autumn colors here in New England are world famous.  Do not visit  these parts if you do not love red, orange, and yellow against white wooden frame buildings and blindingly blue skies.

Sharon, NH has a small population of under 500. It was once a part of the nearby larger town of Peterborough.

On the town seal is a brick one room schoolhouse, which has been in continuous use since it was built in 1832.  Besides the education of the town’s children, the small building has been used by church groups. Currently, town officials meet there.

I drew the contemporary Sharon Arts Center educational building. (There is another Sharon Arts Center location in Peterborough that is a sales and exhibition space.)  A multitude of arts and crafts classes are available here.  

Rochester, NH, with nearly 30,000 residents (2010 census) is a dignified place with brick mills, parks, a circular one way traffic system and a splendid  combination building of town hall and opera house.

First a few words about the mills.  The Cochecho River provided the water power for the gristmills, sawmills, tanneries, and textile mills. Woolen blankets woven here won the first place award at the 1853 New York World’s Fair. Shoes were made here for over seventy years. And quality bricks from Rochester are still holding up the newer buildings of Harvard.

 New Hampshire has at least ten opera houses, built in mill towns for the express purpose of entertainment and enlightenment of the mill workers.  Attendance was required. 

 The Rochester Opera House was designed by George Gilman Adams in 1908, who specialized in dual purpose town hall/opera concepts. He built at least eight all around New England.  Four of his opera houses still exist today, filling multiple purposes within their communities.

What makes this building special is the floor.  Mr. Adams designed an audience floor which can be raised or lowered by a complicated mechanism of cranks, levers, pulleys, and leather belts.  It is the only one of its kind in the United States. For a concert or a play, the floor is raised into a tiered angle.  For a dance or banquet occasion, the floor is of course flat and level.

The opera house, including the floor, has been recently restored.  It has a most ambitious calendar of scheduled events.

I quickly sketched this red pear as a demonstration in my drawing class this summer.  This is one of those ‘the more you look, the more you see’ moments. The shiny red skin was comprised of multitude of shades of many colors.

New Hampshire, Vermont, & Massachusetts

This summer I’ve been teaching a class in on-location drawing as part of the Adventures In Learning program at Colby-Sawyer College here in New London, NH.  For the final class, I decided to take my students to an experimental garden on the college campus.  The assignment was to make a composition which included plants and trees, rocks, structures and people.  And it only seemed fair to try it myself too. I moved Mount Kearsarge just a little to fit into the picture.  (One of the messages of my class was that it’s OK to do things like that.  You’re not taking a photograph; you’re recording an impression.)

The apple in the tree is on a stamp which arrived in the mail today.  We did a warmup drawing of apples and pears indoors before we walked outside to the garden.  I thought it would be fun to add a small element of collage.

Here’s a link to a page that describes the class in greater detail, along with a few pictures of the class in action.  It was a fun experience for all, me included.

 

It’s another event on the town green. The New London Garden Club hosts an annual Antique Show as a fund raiser.  Forty vendors come to sell their wares under the tents.  They were packing up as I stood on the lawn sketching the array of objects.

 On this occasion each year, the band stand in the center becomes an antique stall.   

The day after the Antique Show, where I worked all day, we headed over to Windsor, Vermont to the Harpoon Brewery Beer and BBQ Festival.  

I had my sketchbook in my lap so no one saw me drawing.  Everyone was listening to the music anyway.

 

Each year I enjoy picking blueberries.  The red bucket is lined with a plastic bag for easy weighing and transporting home. I sat down in the blueberry patch to draw this.

 

Radishes are fun to draw as well as delicious. 

We were in the Boston (Massachusetts) Public Garden last month.  In the center of my drawing is one of the famed Swan Boats. 

 The boat driver sitting behind the swan is pedaling the craft through the water.

 I suspect that many people riding on the swan boat remember doing the same as children. And perhaps they have brought their own children, or grandchildren,  on this day.

The double pontooned swan boats are a Boston tradition since 1877.  A very clever Roger Paget, a boat rental owner,  invented them by combining the public’s keen interest in bicycles with his own fascination with the opera Lohengrin.  In the opera, a knight rescues a young woman by riding a swan.

 

I add three drawings now that give a nod to the waning of summer, the start of autumn and the new school year.

Clarksville, New Hampshire is way up north, near Pittsburg.  This private home is a former school.  It still looks just like as a school.

 

Gilford, New Hampshire is a small town tucked away off the highway.   When I drew this, it was right after school had resumed for the autumn.

 As I drew I could not help but hear the conversations between the children as they walked home from school.  They were laughing and teasing one another and catching up on their summer time away from each other.  It was pleasant to listen to their chatter as I drew. 

 They didn’t see me as I was off to the side and up a little slope.  I drew them as sort of ghost like figures because they had all passed before I could draw them and I drew them from memory.

 

The view of this lake struck me.  Such pretty little islands.  And all those small rocks in the water making a parade. 

This is Middleton, NH.  I drew this in autumn 2012, and the leaves were starting to turn.

 

These bonnets were all lined up at the New London Historical Society.  Theme and variation intrigues me.

New Hampshire

The weekly Market On the Green in New London has started again. There’s a good mix of fresh garden produce and hand made craft items. We are vendors of notecards and drawings and paintings, and this is the view from our tent.  All the art and craft items must be made by the vendors themselves.  If not, it would just be a flea market.  We enjoy meeting people and hearing their stories.

Yesterday it poured down rain.  But when the closing bell rang from the nearby church steeple, the sun came cheerfully out.  Instantly.

The building in the right background with the bell tower holds the town offices.  It was originally a school and  never a church, although it does resemble one.

Stop by between 3 and 6 on Wednesdays from now through early September.  We’d love to see you.

A Swedish style wooden horse in front of Polly’s Pancake Parlor in Sugar Hill, NH.  I had a to do some research about red horses from Sweden.  I guess there is no symbolism; they just look charming.  The owner of Polly’s a while ago built one for his grandchildren.  This is a new replacement this year.  The lupine plant to the left shows the scale of the horse.

The pancakes were delicious.

I returned to the town of Lisbon to redraw a scene for my Draw-NH project.  We artists are a picky bunch. The yellow building is now housing for seniors.  The shop behind the green awning sells art supplies.  Surprisingly,  I didn’t stop in.  The view through the ornate wooden porch nicely frames the yellow wooden one and the brick block, 1907.

Lisbon, with  a population under 1600, has a lilac festival in May. The main street sports lilac flags from every lamp post.

 After the names of Concord, Chiswick, and Gunthwaite didn’t stick, it was named Lisbon in 1824 after the governor’s friend who was a consul in  Portugal.

Early industries included charcoal manufacturing, mining, and mills along the Ammonoosuc River.  Other facts from the town website:  the Parker Young factory was once the world’s largest manufacturer of piano sounding boards.  And on a divergent note,  New Hampshire’s first ski tow was here.

 

The Silsby Free Public Library and the town offices make a handsome pair of brick buildings on Main Street in Charlestown, NH. Charlestown sits along the banks of the Connecticut River, bordering the state of Vermont.  In 1781, Charlestown briefly declared itself to be part of Vermont due to friction with the New Hampshire state capital of Concord.  The records show that George Washington insisted that the town return its allegiance to NH in 1783. 

The main street is lined with fine examples of architecture worth preserving. Sixty-three buildings are listed in the National Register of Historic Places.  I had a very nice stroll along this street while deciding which building to draw.  And a picnic lunch on a bench.

 

The historical society in Dorchester, NH was closed the day I was in town.  But I liked the classical simple design of the former school house.  It is constructed with painted red clapboards. 

This small town is named for Dorchester, England.  At a population of under 400, it is half of what it was at one time.  Its former industries were sawmills, shingles and clapboards, and the production of charcoal.  

Many towns in New England lost half their population in the mid to late 1800s due to westward migration after soldiers returned from the Civil War.

 Franconia, NH is all about the White Mountains. The poet Robert Frost and his family awoke to this panoramic vista each morning from 1915 to 1920.  For twenty more years, they returned for summers. The mail box in rusting tin is labeled “R. Frost”, and the peeling black letters are in his hand.  I remember tracing the letters with my finger when I was there as a young child.

The simple farm house is now a center for poetry simply called the Frost Place.  Nature trails through the woods are dotted with plaques of his poetry.

The Colby Chaise, circa 1825, was owned by New Hampshire’s governor Anthony Colby (1792-1873).  It is a wonderful addition to the collection of the New London Historical Society.  Although it is housed in their large, impressive transportation building, I imagined it outdoors near Mount Kearsarge.

When printed as a note card, this is one of the very few images that winds its way around to the back side of the card.

The carriage was restored in 1937 in Dearborn, Michigan.

The Studebaker Junior is a deluxe wagon made for children by the Studebaker Company in South Bend, Indiana.   It was probably intended to be pulled by a goat or an animal of similar size.  I tried to imagine the day it was new.  Perhaps Christmas morning?  With or without goat?

This small-scale wooden vehicle is in the transportation building in the New London Historical Society Collection, in New London, NH.  It is about three feet (one meter) high.

The Studebaker company made top line wagons for farmers, miners, and soldiers for sixty years.  And carriages for wealthy people.  Then for another fifty years, they made horseless carriages, or automobiles. The company went out of business in the 1960s, but Studebaker fan clubs do still exist.

 And then tonight I said to my husband, “Wait a minute. We have a photo of you, posing in a goat pulled wagon, back when you were four years old.  I wonder if it might have been a Studebaker Junior?”  Comparing the pictures, I now feel sure that it is.

He really wasn’t a wealthy child who had a goat pulling him around.  This was just a photo op near the corner of Beech Street and Trapelo Road in Belmont, a suburb of Boston.  A traveling photographer was taking pictures on the sidewalk—not something you’d encounter every day.  His best childhood friend from across the street also has a similar picture in his archives, and both pictures have shown up on Facebook.

 This drawing is reposted from winter 2010. The fruits, a typical still life subject matter, are a flat background design on the tablecloth.  Artists often draw their tools. These pencils are all pigment, with no wooden casing.  I love them.

 My Adventures In Learning class is coming up in July. This two hour, four session class will take place on the Colby-Sawyer College campus here in New London, NH. We will be doing on location (outdoors) drawing, and many of the students will be using colored pencils.

British Columbia and New Hampshire

One morning while visiting our family in British Columbia, I took a long meandering walk.  A hot, sunny, dry day, it was perfect for sitting on the curb and drawing.  The Cedar Creek Winery in Kelowna spills down the steep hillside to the lake. The plants are staked and wired and ready for this season’s leafy growth, to be followed by the grapes.

The name of the beautiful plant with the abundant flowers is unknown to me. The yellow composite flowers and shiny, holly-like leaves edged in red were everywhere.  In the background is Okanagan Lake. The Bennett Bridge connects the city of West Kelowna with Kelowna itself.

Kelowna is a four hour drive inland, east of the major city of Vancouver.  The trip from the coast involves two mountain passes of over 4000 feet elevation.  In late April, we drove across the passes and through two blizzards.  A week later our return trip via Stevens Pass in the northwest corner of Washington featured bright blue skies and temperatures in the 80s.  Spring had happened!

One day on our visit to Kelowna, we climbed Knox Mountain. Knox is a Scottish surname, and many of the early European settlers here were from Scotland. The view shows another vantage point of the city.

In the foreground, a magpie perches on a rock. The squawky, bold, intelligent birds are members of the crow family.  In flight, bright blue feathers flash along with the black and white.

In fourth grade (age nine), my teacher wrote on my report card that I was a magpie. Magpies do not inhabit the east coast of the US where I grew up.  So I didn’t know exactly what she meant, but I understood that it was not a compliment.  I was a bit full of myself that year and was known to talk too much to my neighbors.  For a while, my desk was moved into the corner.

Down the precipitously steep hill you see pines, a bike path, and an industrial harbor with floating logs awaiting the sawmill. And the main downtown with tall buildings, an arena, and a casino. Along the edges of the lake are flattish areas called benches, sites of both orchards and vineyards.  Way in the distance are snow-covered blue peaks.

We spent quite a lot of time with our five year old grandson, doing what boys like to do....throw sticks and play in the sand. No they are not twins, just one busy little boy and his Grandad.

This is Okanagan Lake, and you can see the benches and the vineyards better here than in the last drawing.

Another beach, another play day with our grandson. Here I drew him three times. The town beaches in Kelowna boast playgrounds, trees growing at water’s edge, and of course the views of the mountains.

He convinced me to go down the red plastic twisting slide. Once.

After a lunch with friends in mid April, I fit in time to draw this domestic structure in Greenland, NH, near Portsmouth and the seacoast.  It sits in front of a small triangle of land, a meeting of three small roads.  In the center of the triangle is an ornate bandstand that I considered drawing. But the stately, imposing home won out.  The wooden clapboarded house dates from maybe 1800-1830.  Just a guess.  The putty colored building has an unusual number of flat columns. Green wooden shutters and white brick chimneys complete the façade.

Stratham, NH and the area is sometimes called Antique Alley.  Located in the southeast of the state, the area is heavily touristed.  New Hampshire’s citizens are highly entrepreneurial. Everyone has something to sell by the side of the road. All the items along the curb are for sale.

 This building is the former town hall of Stratham.  It is a late Victorian style, maybe 1890, with a mansard roof.  Very stylish and very French.

 

Here in Madison, NH I was attracted to (read that as “stopped in my tracks”) by the town offices and police station.   The style is Craftsman I think.  It is unusually tall for that architectural style, but I am going by the wooden façade shingles, and the small and varied window shapes. 

 I read online that this building was moved to this site.  That is an admirable skill, and not that uncommon here.  Ox teams, heavy duty sleds, and helping hands were readily available to move buildings on snow-packed roads in the winter time, and they were much more affordable than employing a master carpenter to construct a brand new building.

 

   Last weekend we took a tour of the Spring Ledge Farm here in New London, NH.  The farm, on about 60 acres, is on protected land.  That is, it is preserved as farmland, never to be zoned for housing—occupying prime territory right on the main street of a pretty well-to-do town. The open house tour happens twice a year.  And we never miss it as it is all so informative.  We’ve learned many things there that immediately get put to use in our own garden.

The farm is owned and operated by Greg Berger and a team of people who are very dedicated to their work.  And who employ so much science in the planning, operating, and evaluating of their enterprise. 

 At the end of the tour, we are each invited to take a freebie.  One year it was a bag of alpaca manure.  This time, we chose these gorgeous geranium plants.

 They now sit on our front steps.  Are they talking to each other?  Saying things like “Are you scared?  Do you miss our family of a thousand in the greenhouse?”  I remember seeing geraniums growing wild in the fields in Malta, an island in the Mediterranean.  That fascinates me.  A coddled house plant in one corner of the world is a freely self seeding wild flower in another.

Late breaking news

Things happen at the last minute in Radio and TV Land.  I just learned that my January interview with New Hampshire Public Radio is scheduled to air tonight, probably on the local segment of All Things Considered at 6:30.  But it’s already up online, accompanied by a nice album of my drawings.  It should be available there forever, so there’s no need to tune to 89.1 on your radio dial—if your radio still has a dial.  Here’s a link.

Relatives and friends will spot a few minor factual errors.  We never lived in California, and my husband never ran a store in Alton.  That was his aunt and uncle’s Busy Corner Store in Alton Bay (I drew that, of course), though he did run the soda fountain one day when they were attending their daughter’s graduation in Boston and his family pitched in to keep the store running.  Fox watching the chicken coop it was.

New Hampshire and Massachusetts

 

These pansies are so ready to get out of their plastic market packs and start spreading their roots in the ground.  The bright sunshine creates dramatic shadows around the solid black pots.

Pansy is an anglicized version of the French word pensée, meaning thought.  Pansies make me think of my mother’s mother and her garden.

I have been experimenting with using soft charcoal sticks to make rich blacks.  Then I combine this with translucent watercolors for a contrast. Just a little shop talk.

The city of Boston, Massachusetts fills the skyline in the distance.  Drawn while on Lovells Island in the harbor, the composition details wild ferns and berries in the foreground. Yes, this is a reposting from a few years ago, as we are all thinking of Boston these days.

The thirty four islands in the harbor comprise a national park.  Scheduled boat shuttle services are provided to some of them.  For other islands, you need to arrive in your own boat.

 

The tower of the Hampstead, NH Town Offices is highly ornamented with wooden sculptural details.   The pink cherry blossoms on the tree. and that yellowish green of the brand new leaves spell out spring! 

 The weathervane is modeled after an old fashioned feather pen. 

 

The brick and slate tower of the Plaistow, NH town hall rises from the middle of Pollard Square. Another intriguing weathervane spins atop the peak. 

A little online research for the name Plaistow proved worthwhile.  This town is the only Plaistow in the U.S., but the name is used at least five times in the U.K.  Plaistow, a northeast part of London, suffered severe bomb damage during WWII.

 Last week we drove north to Plymouth, NH to visit the new Museum of the White Mountains at Plymouth State University. The paintings on the walls of the museum enchanted us.

A secondary reason to visit the campus was to discover yet another home of the poet Robert Frost.  The poet and his wife Elinor, also a poet, lived here for a year with their four small children, 1911–1912. A year of teaching allowed the family to save some money.

They then set sail for England, with Frost’s goal of becoming a full time writer.  After three years living west of London, they returned to America.  During those short pivotal years, Frost met other influential poets, as well as found a publisher for his first two poetry books.

The lines and colors of my drawing are soft and floating as an aid to remembering two poetic spirits who lived and breathed here.

It must be disorienting for a British citizen to travel around New England.  Many of the place names sound very familiar.  But the places themselves differ so much.  Plymouth is a large port city on the Channel.  Here in New Hampshire, Plymouth charms as a small, hilly college town in the White Mountains range.

Springfield, NH shares a border with our town.  With a small population of under 1,300 it nonetheless boasts this fine old meeting house (1797), recently restored. The wooden buildings stand tall with their strong granite foundations.

We once enjoyed a talk on local flora and fauna, held at the meetinghouse. On the way home, at dusk, we spied a fine looking moose giving us the once over from a nearby field.  Its eyes glowed in the dark from our head lights.

On the right sits the Springfield Historical Society in the former Center School. After a more modern school was constructed, it became the town library.  Now a new library is attached to the town hall.  All these social units are within sight of each other.

A local policeman approached me while I stood on this spot drawing. I had to explain myself.  I do look suspicious. 

The Mount Caesar Union Library serves the community in Swanzey, NH.  Some of the early  European settlers came from Swansea, Wales. The  imposing structure, with its white wooden clapboards, green shutters, and columns, is found on the map in southwestern New Hampshire near Keene.

Mount Caesar,  a local mountain of 962 feet elevation, takes its name from the freed slave Freeman Caesar.

In Windham, NH, on a slight rise sit these two contrasting buildings.  The clapboarded building houses the town hall, the town offices, the grange, and a meeting place of the American Legion, a veterans group.  The lovely stone edifice, once the Nesmith Free Library,  is now a museum. 

 

Lawrence, Massachusetts was well known for its textile mills, built both in brick and in stone.The rubblestone tower in the center (125 ft) vented the smoke from the Lawrence Machine Shop in the background.  Locomotives were manufactured there.

  Not a lot is still manufactured in Lawrence, but we were told one mill still exists. Currently a shipping business occupies some of this mammoth building.

My husband’s grandparents immigrated to the Lawrence area from England and Scotland in the early 1900s, drawn by the opportunities provided by the booming textile industry.  One grandfather worked in a woolen mill, now occupied by condominiums and small businesses; the other was employed in a foundry that manufactured machinery for the mills.  We saw a lot of photographs, drawings, and some actual machines in museums here and in nearby Lowell.

Lawrence, Lowell, and a number of other industrial cities in both Massachusetts and New Hampshire got their power from dams on the Merrimack River.  The lake at the bottom of our hill is one of the many sources that ultimately feed that river, further adding to our interest in the industrial history of the area.

On the way back home from a little shopping trip, I pulled over and parked my car on Main Street in Tilton, NH.  This town, in the middle of the state,  is full of visual oddities begging to be captured with pencil and paper.

 The brick corner building spoke to me.  A tour de force of masonry details, arched wooden window trim, cast iron, and decorative urns, the drawing challenge kept me going despite  sandy gusts of wind whipping up the street.  A tangle of telephone poles and wires are reflected in the windows, which really did look purple.

And to continue with the theme of Tilton’s oddities, I’m including a reposting of this drawing I did two years ago.

These statues along the Main Street were donated to the town by Charles Tilton.  On the far left, “Miss Tilton, 1882”, all in marble. Her hand rests on a horse’s head.  Draped in linen-like folds, she wears a crown.

 In the center,  a bronze Squantum Chief scans the horizon.  Beautifully designed and cast, he  wears buckskins and carries a bow and arrows. This sculpture was moved to the side of the main street from its original location in the center.

 On the right, in carved marble stone, stands the Indian Queen. She’s on a pedestal in the middle of the street, with the traffic circling around her.  With a lion’s head draped over her shoulder, and a giant lizard at her feet, she amazes me. Not to mention,  her  strange headdress, an odd skirt, and no shirt at all.

Our little felt Paddington bear sits in our window seat enjoying the view and the sunshine.  Hand sewn by my mother, he is a world traveller. His story tells that he comes from Peru, but with us he’s visited the British Isles and Europe.  Our younger daughter carried him everywhere for a few years.

His coat has shrunk in the wash and his boots have gone missing in some unknown country.  But Paddy still has a smile and a mischievous glint in his eyes.

I remember the day, in a castle in Germany, that our four year old daughter held him up high so that he could take in the wonderful view out of the window. The view that she was too short to see for herself.