Part IV in a series on Hervey White. Erroneously named “founder” of Woodstock by Life magazine in 1938, White [1866-1944] is better described as godfather of a town he personally transformed into America’s most famous Bohemia, earlier even than 1920. But despite this fact, and although admired by artists and farmers alike, Hervey lived and died an enigma. Some knew part, but none knew all his secrets.
Art lovers don’t walk in off the street anymore in Woodstock — at least not to buy works by the artists who first put the town on the map. So Tom Fletcher, whose art auctions and web-based transactions allowed him to keep his Mill Hill Road gallery doors open well past a dramatic down-turn in sales will continue to sell art from out of his Byrdcliffe home. But this same tenacious Tom Fletcher three weeks ago bowed to the inevitable. The culprit? A long-punishing “investment shift” towards non-representational art, and the recent rise of on-line Mega-galleries all but obliterating sales for smaller galleries.
The play’s premise is simple. Newcomers named “Jones” encounter next door neighbors who share this same last name. As well as something darker.
Part III in a series on Hervey White. Erroneously named “founder” of Woodstock by Life magazine in 1938, White [1866-1944] is better described as godfather of a town he personally transformed into America’s most famous Bohemia, earlier even than 1920. But despite this fact, and although admired by artists and farmers alike, Hervey lived and died an enigma. Some knew part, but none knew all his secrets.
Those who begin to study this town’s most elusive character at his end rather than at his beginning, won’t ever capture Hervey White. That’s why the godfather of Woodstock has eluded so many for so long. Scholars read Hervey’s last and least honest effort, that paid-for-but-never-published “Autobiography” and consider it gospel.
Erroneously named “founder” of Woodstock by Life magazine in 1938, Hervey White [1866-1944] is better described as godfather of a town he personally transformed into America’s most famous Bohemia, earlier even than 1920. But despite this fact, and although admired by artists and farmers alike, Hervey lived and died an enigma. Some knew part, but none knew all his secrets.
On Friday, April 26, a fashion show at Colony Woodstock will celebrate styles of the 1970’s fifty years later, predominantly created by a mother-daughter team of seamstresses, and curated by the surviving daughter, Molly Farley.
No legend in the making is impervious to the first gush of early praise. But a roster of remarkable players have much to say on behalf of Chogyi Lama so we’ll have to gamble on his humility holding up. Thursday night, April 4, Chogyi will begin his evening with an acoustic set at Colony Woodstock, 22 Rock City Road, featuring Daniel Littleton and local phenom singer Olivia Gabriel, before leading his own full band in a set.
Betty Ballantine, editorial half of the husband/wife team who pioneered the American paperback, died — as she’d wished she might — in her home on Ballantine Hill in Bearsville.
I’m not going to pretend, friends, that America in the year 2018 and The Spirit of Christmas are subjects easily corralled into the same article, except for the intervention of a truly weird coincidence. For in describing to you the enigma of the recently deceased Bud Sife we’ll be catapulted into a zone where a civilization in near collapse and A Merry Christmas can and do absolutely exist, side by side.
Help us to continue to provide great, locally-owned journalism on Hudson Valley One and in print with New Paltz Times, Woodstock Times, Saugerties Times & Kingston Times.
