The View from Mary's Farm for October
September 15, 2009
On the Edge of OctoberThere are many things that I love about this area but one of my strongest pulls is from the legacy of art that underlies this and our surrounding towns. Beautiful landscape paintings seem like the very earth beneath our feet here or at least this earth is the sustenance out of which these paintings have grown. Many artists have lived here. Their life stories are as fascinating as their works. Albert Quigley lived in the nearby town of Nelson. He died in 1961 so I never knew him but I have heard so many stories, I feel as if I did. He lived in a tumble-down house near the town green where he raised his family, clearing off the kitchen table in order to paint and trading his paintings for groceries and odd jobs that he needed done. The births of all three of his children were paid for with paintings. Quig could do many things – he was a master fiddler and when he wasn’t painting, he worked long hours at the local woolen mill – but he was also remembered for his gentle nature and good heart.
His son, Barney, lives now in New York City, but each spring, he and his wife Nancy return to a remote cabin beside one of our beautiful lakes. With floors that seemed they might give way with each step and a roof that sagged and sometimes leaked, the cabin was at the edge of the lake on a little spit of land, nothing in sight but water and the trees on the other side. All those years, Barney rented from an old fellow who owned a lot of lake frontage and rented out camps to eager city folk. He kept them the way he kept his own house and his clothes – threadbare to say the least. But Barney didn’t mind, in fact, I’m pretty sure he liked it that way. More like home. But, as is the way in this life, the old man of the lake died and his land went to his heirs and there has been quite a lot of change as a result. One of them was Barney’s camp. One summer, Barney and Nancy stayed somewhere else while the old camp was torn up and rebuilt, a new version of the old. They looked forward to the time when their old place, now new, would be ready.
Quig’s paintings have an evocative, almost elegiac palette of grey with hints of pink. He seemed drawn to the edges of the season, the cusp of change. Last fall, Barney and Nancy’s new Shangri-la was ready and they asked me for dinner, late one October day. Walking into the new place seemed like a shift out of time, nothing reminiscent of the old place except a few familiar pieces of furniture. New appliances shone out from the wall and the smell of fresh cut pine lingered throughout. They invited me out onto the big new deck that all but overhangs the water. An unobstructed view of the water lay before us. The trees on the other side of the lake were bright with their end-of-summer colors which reflected in the dark water as the sun set. Like something Quig might have painted. Loons made their mournful calls. We sat out there until the last faint pink colors on the water faded to black and then went inside where Barney and Nancy laid a feast on the same old table whose legs now rested on solid floors. Then we raised our glasses in toast to the next several generations of memories. And to the tipping point of October.
For more information about the work of Albert Quigley, go to http://www.monadnockart.org/history.html