Does it make sense to speak of a Hudson Valley style of art? I questioned a number of local experts.
“What is the nature of Hudson Valley art?” I asked Tom Luciano in a text. “Nature is the nature of Hudson Valley art!” he replied. “From Thomas Cole to Nat King Cole, it’s always been Nature Boy!”
Thomas Cole was the founder of the Hudson River School, circa 1825. “Nature Boy” was a hit song by Nat King Cole in 1948. Tom’s the owner of Luciano Fine and Decorative Art in Shokan.
Chase Folsom, of Headstone Gallery in Kingston, disagreed. “I think style in reference to place is just weird. It’s natural that you go to New York City, somebody’s going to paint cityscapes. Up here, yeah, people paint nature, but people have always been obsessed with nature.
“I’m thinking of Jim Hodges. He lived in New York City, early in his career, and he had no money, and he went to bars, and he would draw flowers and floral motifs on bar napkins — and it ended up becoming a piece.”
“Everybody who’s here has come from somewhere else,” Lauren Aitken, co-director of Headstone, pointed out. “Like Rich Cali; he’s from Austin.”
It’s been this way for a while. “People would ask, in the early 20th century, Is there a Woodstock style?” noted art historian Bruce Weber. “And the consensus of critics, in major magazines and newspapers, was that there wasn’t – and that was good! Because of the diversity. And that’s what makes it interesting.”
“Something I do notice in the Hudson Valley: I’m going to use the word craft,’” Folsom added, on reflection. “There are a lot of incredible craftspeople here. They have the benefit of time and space, and sometimes money. I see a lot of furniture makers here, beautiful furniture makers – which makes sense. You have to use massive logs, so you need space. I do see a lot of people who take advantage of space around here; and they’re making work I’ve never seen before.”
Aitken mentioned a recent visit to the studio of furniture-maker Michael Puryear. Lauren and Chase also taught me the phrase “It slaps,” meaning that something’s really good – hence the title of this essay.
Lots of people have collections up here, which they store in their basements, attics, outbuildings. There’s cheap yard sales, and Family of Woodstock has a free store. (Even I have a massive number of socks, if that counts as a collection.) Sometimes those piles of keepsakes transform, almost effortlessly, into artworks.
I know two artists – Marilyn Stablein and Ann Byer – who’ve made sculptures out of their necktie collections. And come to think of it, who needs neckties in the Hudson Valley? Men, and a few women, carry them up from Brooklyn, and gradually divest themselves of these archaic accessories.
Dana Weidman, professor of media arts and film at Dutchess County Community College, spoke to me about her art studies. “For the last few years I’ve been painting at the Harvest Gallery, on the Greig Farm in upper Red Hook. It’s not really a class. We all have our easels set up in the gallery; we pay a monthly fee. And Drew Miller, who’s our teacher – it’s his gallery – is an amazing portrait painter.
“It never would’ve occurred to me to paint a portrait, because when I started taking classes with Drew I could barely draw a circle – but because he’s a portrait painter, that’s what I’m learning,” said Weidman. “I think what’s kind of cool is, even though Drew never says, ‘Okay, this week we’re going to paint … a certain subject,’ we do have this odd synergy in the gallery, where all of a sudden you’ll walk in and we’re all painting dogs.”
That’s a good point. In urban centers, dogs are shrinking. One sees guys with goatees in Manhattan walking creatures that resemble large, well-trained mice. But in the Hudson Valley, dogs can be dogs. (In fact, one is barking next door as I write this.) The dogs in our local art, I would wager, are vivider and more robust than the ones in city paintings.
Weidman is also the director of her college’s art gallery. “When you think about Hudson Valley art, you inevitably think about landscape,” she remarked. “And I’m actually working on a show for March 2025, where I was introduced to a local artist, Daisy dePuthod. She’s French, and she paints the coast of Maine, the Hudson River. Central to the work is often water. I’m thinking about water in the landscape, thinking about what water means to us. What is the Hudson Valley? It’s water; it’s the source of life.
“So I was considering having a dual show, and I ended up talking to a more abstract artist, and this man is also French, his name is Jean-Marie Martin, and he works in blue. He works with his hands – he doesn’t even use a brush! There’s such an aquatic nature to the work: dark blue, indigo blue.
I wrote him an email, coming out of his studio, ‘I feel like your work has waves in it, like it’s always moving.’ He mixes his paint with silicone, so it’s sort of wavy.
“So I’m talking to Daisy and Jean-Marie about having a dual show: one is a very abstract way of thinking about water, the other is representational.”
Art historians say that the Hudson River School painters obsessed on light, but come to think of it, the light was usually reflected in a body of water. After all, it wasn’t called the Sunshine School.
The town I live in, Phoenicia, has one “use value“ – to employ a Marxist term – besides a smattering of tourism. Our job is to create drinking water for New York City. Mostly that involves standing aside and letting the Esopus Creek flow. (Though one of my friends, whom I’ll call Xerxes, ritually pees in the creek once a year, as a symbolic rebuke of the Big Apple.)
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