ML - Boston Common

2014 - Issue 3 - Summer

Boston Common - Niche Media - A side of Boston that's anything but common.

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOANNA ELDREDGE MORRISSEY W hen I first arrived in the woods of Peterborough, New Hampshire, it was December and the sun set at around 4:45, and I took my nightly walk to dinner amid biblical darkness in a state of palm- tingling dread. Once, when a barn owl launched itself noisily from a branch above me, I broke into a sprint, fumbling like Cary Grant under Hitchcock's crop duster. In truth, the walk covered just several hundred yards, but I was hardly alone among the spooked urban neurotics attempting rustic living at the MacDowell Colony. I'm happy to report that the fear of God's creatures and the dark are about the worst of it. In fact, for many of the several hundred painters, writers, composers, and sundry creatives who come here every year, the visit marks the first time that they have been to a place that exists solely to sustain their work. MacDowell's first guests—sisters named Mary Mears and Helen Farnsworth Mears—took up residence there in 1907. In a society in which government funding for the arts has never been a populist notion, the colony established a new and widely imitated private model for supporting artists, perhaps the most pragmatic one to date. If some wayward sociologist decided to suss out the ideal conditions for making art, she might come up with a formula much like the one they've settled on in Peterborough: hours of solitude and quiet, freedom from phones and Wi-Fi (except in the library), a useful amount of remove from the more common vices, plenty of walking paths, nourishing food, and enough encouragement to keep even marginal egos productive. Colonists (admit- tedly a creepy term) work in 32 studios arranged in the woods cunningly, so that the view from nearly every porch creates the impression of isolation. Breakfast and dinner are communal. Blake Tewksbury, a man with the tem- perament of a small-town parish priest who has been at the colony for more than 30 years, arrives every morning with lunch packed into a wicker basket and sets it on your porch gingerly, making sure not to rattle the screen door. Throughout the afternoon a showy jet-black turkey or a fox may strafe across ACABIN OFONE'SOWN WHAT STARTED AS A PRIVATE RETREAT FOR ONE COMPOSER HAS BECOME A CRUCIBLE OF INSPIRATION FOR THOUSANDS OF ARTISTS. BY ALEX HALBERSTADT Artist Beth Krebs created this temporary installation, called Dropped Ceiling, for the colony. 104 BOSTONCOMMON-MAGAZINE.COM

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