Crooked Brook Studios

Harvested metal, wire recall farm heritage

By KIM SMITH DEDAM PressRepublican

A countryside lane breaks from the road, turning off toward a sloping farm field.

These meadows are private, cut and tedded and baled in season for centuries.

But a new hiking trail will open here on Sept. 27, providing passage around fields of sculpted wood, iron and stone.

The Art Farm Trail is already cut and marked. Its pathway laid carefully around hills that framed Crooked Brook ages ago.

It weaves a one mile, onelane path through art outcroppings created by Westport artist Ted Cornell, who offers sequel to farm stories and found objects.

EARLIER STARS

Walking in hay rows past works of art at Cornell’s farm, only crickets belie the silence his sculptures keep.

The soft susurrus of wind sometimes carries the long, drowsy twang of a locust over the meadow. The brook burbles idly in its dry season. Geese trumpet from their late summer flight paths overhead.

“For me, I love junk and always have. I remember as a boy finding something in the grass and wondering where it came from and how it got that way,” Cornell said.

“Junk has memory and junk suggests possibilities. I love it because it awakens unknown futures. I love it because it talks to us about our common origins, how we all come
from a long line of junk.

“Our very sun is a junk star, made of the debris of earlier stars.”

RECOLLECTING FARM INDUSTRY

Some 20 sculptures conjure new shapes from a few tons of found farm debris: a McCormick Deering reaperbinder, a grain chute, cart wheels, tractor parts, rubber hoses, old glass, plowshares and stone piles.

They are planted strategically on meadow flats around the coiled brook and manmade pond, which was the first installation. The art grows weathered against a mountain fringe of dark forest.

The pieces have seasonal queues for entrance and exit, Cornell explains.

Sometimes deep snow eases their sharp angles. Rampant swaths of wildflowers draw new horizon lines around them in spring and summer. Sometimes the setting sun paints them in vivid hues of red and blue.

Here, an oblique box interprets “Boyhood” with, among its dangling parts, a grain chute, an iron seed box, a blue circle of glass.

There, "The Angel of Inerrancy (Conveying WellMeaning Souls to Hell)" raises a halo of hose and metal hands above a glass pitcher. A marble doorknob affixed to its tractor torso offers entrance.

“One of the thematic elements of the Art Farm and those statues is respect for the previous culture,” Cornell said. “Many of those rusting objects are remnants that I appreciate as older culture. And it’s a high engineering culture."

The sculptures suggest stories of purpose: of the people who left them a hundred or more years ago; of an artist's view; of neighbors and friends who helped install each piece; of those who come to see them.

On a meadow flat, the threestory "Memory Tree" points a soaring section of rusted culvert toward the sky.

Cornell found it sliced open for some unexplained reason, left to sink in sod and rot.

Fraught and fragile with a lace of rust at its seams, he gilded the culvert’s slice in gold leaf.

Then he upended it.

“From here, the pipe provides a vertical opening to space. It recognizes a quantum reality called ‘super position,’ which allows that an object can be in more than one place at a time and still be the same thing,” he said.

“The theory goes on to reveal that there are places we can never go — places moving greater than the speed of light, so that we can never catch up,” he said — which isn’t much different than a farmer's Sisyphean task trying to catch up with seasons.

HOMAGE TO HERITAGE

Cornell moved here from the city about 25 years ago. In addition to his paintings, sculpture and work in theater, he has since reinvigorated the Wadhams Free Library, incited and founded the Whallonsburg Grange restoration, and spearheaded the Town of Essex Zoning Ordinance. He has served on the boards of the Depot Theatre and the Boquet River Association.

He draws from the rich heritage here in conjuring new from the old.

“Part of my respect comes from my relationship with Harold Sayre, who farmed around here his whole life," Cornell said.

“When I arrived, there he was in his 80s. We spent an enormous amount of time talking and talking. He told me a lot about living on the farm. There was a deep sophistication of its own kind, intellectually and engineeringwise."

Among sculptures at the Art Farm sits a gangling, old McCormick Deering reaperbinder in its latest act as art. It was once a machine four or five people could operate, either by horse or by tractor.

The reaperbinder could do the work of 20 people, Cornell relayed of Sayre's stories.

“It was the main farming tool not lost to us until the combine came in."

JUNK HARVEST

On this land off Sayre Road, pressed as it is against the acres where Westport, Lewis and Essex town boundaries meet, Cornell fit his painting studio inside the farmhouse around a woodstove.

His outdoor work moves between the barn, a tool bench, a pavilion staging area and the fields.

He literally digs much of the metal parts he uses from the ground. It sprouts sometimes on its own, pushed up by frost or washed out of mud in the spring flood.

Each part presents a piece of the whole story, composing what Cornell believes is a shared event — which is why he approached Champlain Area Trails, based in Westport and known locally as CATS, about adding an Art Farm Trail to their system in eastern Essex County.

While many CATS hiking trails protect wildlife connectivity from fields to wilderness, this one interprets farming through a sculptor's eye and handiwork.

CONNECTIVITY

CATS, Cornell says, with its system of land trust provision and rightsofway on private property, is changing the human concept of connectivity and ownership.

It is finding common ground and connecting it.

“There can be rightsofway without giving up your ownership. One of the things I admire so much about CATS is how they carry out that mission. It comes as a twopage agreement: a well conceived document. It’s probably CATS founder Chris Maron that gets the credit for this.”

It adds a landuse layer he thinks of as “Performance Zoning.”

“I also admire how CATS accepts responsibility for both economic and community development. The facts of hard boundary lines and ownership blend into a series of trails that connects us.”

They connect a walk through the Art Farm to a village bakery and cafe.

In this way, Cornell says, varied parts of community are clearly strung together as a whole.

Rights-of-way cross zoning boundaries, finding an important way to connect rural community, Cornell said.

“You don’t try to zone for each and every event. You can only do what doesn’t unreasonably ruin somebody else’s right to use their land,” he said. “In fact, a wellzoned place created for the benefit of its people actually increases the value of land.”

The new Art Farm Trail is about 1.5 miles round trip, according to Gail Testa, operations and development manager at Champlain Area Trails.

“The idea of CATS was started in the way of thinking about trail systems in Great Britain. They’ve had permission to walk across people’s properties for generations: it’s just understood," she said.

“By connecting our trails, we still have to be able to cross people’s properties, and we do that through rights-of-way. Some of it is done on state land, and sometimes it is done
on back roads.

“In Ted’s case, he came to us and made the suggestion. He liked what we did and wanted to have a trail on his property.”

FINISHED TRAIL

Work on the Art Trail began this summer and was completed by the end of August. Markers with a CATS paw line the route.

There is parking near Cornell's barn at the Sayre Road trailhead. From there, the walking path goes through the artwork, over Crooked Brook to the high field and into the woods.

"It connects to the Field and Forest Trail, which goes another 2.7 miles right into Wadhams,” Testa said.

The Art Farm Trail officially opens on Sept. 27 with two rounds of guided hikes planned that day.

Email Kim Smith Dedam: [email protected]

IF YOU GO

WHAT: Art Farm Trail Opening. Guided hikes led by a CATS representative, Tour of Farm and Art will be led by owner and WHAT artist Ted Cornell.
WHEN: Sept. 27. Guided hikes at 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m.; visitors are welcome to hike the trail at anytime during the day.
WHERE: The Art Farm Trail, Wadhams, 154 Sayre Road.
TO FIND ART FARM TRAIL AND CATS MAPS
Read more about Cornell’s Art Farm online at http://www.crookedbrookstudios.com.
CATS trail system is mapped online at http://www.champlainareatrails.com.
CATS offers a series of interpretive hikes in all seasons. Most include an outdoor education aspect.

UPCOMING CATS EVENTS

• Oct. 11 — Pond Sprint (13mile run or 4.25mile hike to benefit CATS Long Pond Program.
• Oct. 11 — Penfield Museum Apple Folk Fest.
• Oct. 17 — DaCy Meadow Farm Trail Hike & Harvest Lunch (lunch provided by DaCy Meadow Farm).
• Oct. 24 — Owl Prowl with teacher/naturalist Gregg Van Duessen.
  Champlain Area Trails is also planning a series of fullmoon hikes this winter, with snowshoeing events and more Owl Prowls. Many trails are accessible in winter by snowshoes or crosscountry skis.

 

At Crooked Brook Studios, junk acts as conduit

Photo by Pete DeMola

One man’s junk is another man’s art. Edward “Ted” Cornell makes sculptures out of found materials at Crooked Brook, his studio in Wadhams, a space that occupies the confluence of art and agriculture. Readers are encouraged to tour his studio on Aug. 29 as part of the Spirit of Place Studio Tour.

WADHAMS — It’s a striking sight as you hang a right on Sayre Road and drive deeper into the countryside on a mid-summer morning — 

Sculptures punctuating the vista. Dozens of them, from rusting hulks to piles of household objects that look as if they were deposited by an angry telekinetic with the flick of a wrist. 

Welcome to the Art Farm at Crooked Brook Studios. 

It’s a place that exists at the intersection between the two elements of the region’s changing landscape, explained Edward “Ted” Cornell, the farm’s mastermind. 

Art and farming: the former; a draw to attract visitors to the rebirth of the latter. 

The first piece to dot the landscape in 2002 was the “Phoenix of Wadhams,” a sculpture assembled, in part, from a neighbor’s old silo and a discarded tractor axle.

Some would dismiss it as junk. But rusted junk has an honored place at the farm.

“Junk has memory and junk suggests possibilities,” said Cornell. “I love it because it talks to us about our common origins, how we all come from a long line of junk — I love it because it awakens unknown futures.”

Our very sun is a junk star, Cornell noted, made of the debris of its predecessors. 

The artist’s fascination with technology and life was awakened by his relationship with his neighbor, Harold Sayre, when he first moved to the property in 1989 after his growing distemper with New York City became unavoidable.

“I wanted to enter this landscape to be changed by it and work to create a refuge here in an increasingly difficult world,” Cornell wrote in a biographical essay. “Of course, I was not alone.”

Sayre, who owned a 600 acre dairy farm, was immediately welcoming and friendly to his arrival, recalled Cornell, who also keeps a firm hand in a theatre world. Sayre assisted him in his transition and the pair spent many long hours in conversation before the farmer passed away.

“He became a real friend in short time we had together,” said Cornell. “He opened the window on that life that preceded the one we’re living in.”

The sculptures glinted in the haze on muggy summer morning as a pair of black cats, Boris and Sasha, danced underfoot and amidst the technicolor flowers — a slice of Aix-en-Provence right here in the Champlain Valley. 

It’s a place where the items, all of which are constructed from found materials, can provoke intense meditation across a galaxy of concepts — the cosmos, farming history, consumerism, the recession. 

But it’s not all highbrow. The work is laced with deep undercurrents of sardonic humor — like “Stone Cone One,” an, er, floating conical pile of stones. 

You’d better go see for yourself. The farm is always open and Cornell encourages visitors to prowl about. 

The artist noted guests tend to wander the grounds first before seeking out an explanation, eventually looping back to a small structure containing narrative materials.

“A lot of people have a powerful experience without a lot of spurning,” said Cornell.

Cornell said it’s important for the community, those who he referred to as the “skilled people of this valley,” to be involved in the creative process. He already counts the local workmen who help him locate, transport and plant the exhibits into the soil as active collaborators. 

“The community feeds it,” he said. 

The summer has been a busy one for Crooked Brook. Cornell submitted three pieces to the ongoing Spirit of Place exhibition in Westport; he’ll open his studio to the public on Aug. 29 and on Sept. 22, Champlain Area Trails will launch a new trail that’ll take people from the woods and spit them out onto his property.

Cornell envisions skiers and snowshoers dropping in to warm their hands over a fire, cupping cups of hot cider in the moonlight. 

“This is the beginning of a new life for the farm,” said Cornell. 

Crooked Brook open its doors on Saturday, Aug. 29 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. as part of the 2015 Spirit of Place Studio Tour.

NEW WORK ON DISPLAY AT SPIRIT OF PLACE SHOW

I have submitted three pieces to the 2015 Spirit of Place event now in progress at the Heritage House in downtown Westport, NY. The first is a small wall hanging titled Waking Up Beside You In The Dark.  It is assembled from a melted Cuisinart and broken shards of Christmas tree ornaments from my childhood.  It was more than a decade ago that I spent a week or two melting and burning a whole range of household appliances and electrical equipment in a search for new forms.  My young friend Kyle Blemel who was working with me that summer abetted me in this project.  (Apparently our exercise in destruction did him no harm as he is now a successful industrial designer.)  However the only new forms that emerged were rather gross and useless except for this white piece which lived for years on the barn wall as a fascinating grotesque before it fell and broke two years ago suddenly revealing the grinning skeleton riding on a skull.  Then just this spring I added the broken ornaments. The second piece, also a junk sculpture, is intended for installation in a garden pool or pond, or perhaps a gentle stream.  It should rest on a large flat rock just at water level.  It is titled Birds Feeding and happened suddenly this spring when I was given the strange thing that appears to be a manually operated auger.  I entangled the auger with an unidentified object I had pulled out of the swamp when I first moved here, and then I added the golden ornament that was in play because of the work on Waking Up Beside You In The Dark. The third piece, a portrait of winter in my wetland, is a small oil on panel I called Styx because I was reading around in a strange multi-author translation of Dante’s Inferno I had borrowed from the wonderful Wadhams Free Library.  It is the most recent of the many photo-realistic paintings I have made.  I work from small prints of photos I have taken, sometimes dozens of the same subject.  The small size of the photo print provides a rigorous focus.  I go back to the painting again and again over as much as a year, often examining the print I have chosen with a magnifying glass.  I find many gestures in the print where it seemed at first there was only one, many different perspectives, different visual stories buried there.  When I am fortunate the painting, usually itself quite large allowing room for all I have discovered, seems to hover and breathe. One of these large format paintings now hangs in the meeting room of the Essex Town Hall.  It is called Election Day, and I introduce it here to talk about another facet of my work that is central to my experience with the spirit of this place. Election Day, oil on panel, 35”x 48”, 1996 I think of this painting as depicting three constituents of life on Earth. In order of seniority and specific gravity they are the ancient rock, the numberless grasses and constitutional democracy. I think of democracy as being represented in the painting by the unknown that lies over the hill. That is what I like best about our Election Day, the convivial manner in which we confront the unknown and all toss our futures into the air together. It seems uniquely modern to me, joyfully scientific, that we should have a public celebration of uncertainty. So my work has a philosophical bent.   As a theater director in New York, I was an early associate of Joe Papp, impresario of the famously radical and obstreperous New York Shakespeare Festival and Public Theater.  It was at the Public that I directed the first off-Broadway play to win a Pulitzer Prize.  Later I won an Obie for myself, working at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.  But more than anything I loved the big tough city and came to know it from many angles.  I was a single parent, drove a cab, taught acting, won a rent strike, was a freight brakeman on the Penn Central Railroad, and part of an investment banking firm with its offices at One World Trade Center.  We specialized in creating privately placed, tax-exempt bonds for rural health care institutions. I loved the action, loved being in the big world, but more and more I came to feel that we were losing ground, the city was changing in bad ways, that everything we did somehow didn’t matter. These feelings, whether hormonal, doctrinal, or simply very private are common enough in the human story, a powerful force. In my case the response to a growing distemper was, after a lot of looking both inward and outward, to put my art-self in a direct, creative, unmediated relationship with the wilderness and civilization of the Adirondacks.  I wanted to be formed not by the conventions of the world power center in New York, however magnificent, but by the instinct for bravery, freedom and mutual caring as it is lived here up north in the cold.  I wanted to enter this landscape to be changed by it and work to create a refuge here in an increasingly difficult world.  Of course I was not alone. My eclectic background has allowed me to be of help in the restoration and growth of the Wadhams Free Library, “the little library with a big window on the world”, also in the re-writing of the Town Plan and Zoning Ordinance for the town of Essex in my role as Planning Board Chair, and the regeneration of the Whallonsburg Grange Hall now celebrating its Centennial as a vibrant community center and cultural engine in the Boquet valley. But getting back to junk.  Rusted junk has an honored place here.  Life can be hard.  We know how to make do, to improvise.  Brooklyn where I lived for thirty years is another place that understands junk and hard times.  Broken refugees recover there, and then their children grow up to write great music and Broadway plays. As for me, I love junk and always have.  I remember as a boy finding something in the grass and wondering where it came from and how it got that way.  Junk has memory and junk suggests possibilities. I love it because it talks to us about our common origins, how we all come from a long line of junk.  I love it because it awakens unknown futures.  Our very sun is a junk star, made of the debris of earlier stars.  Regeneration, the indomitable growth of new life from old, is for me the spirit of this place. Please visit me at the Art Farm on the CATS Art Farm Trail outside of Wadhams.  See some monumental junk sculpture and other fine art in a gorgeous setting. Ted Cornell 518 962 4386 The Memory Tree (2013) at the Art Farm.

My Work Is on Display in the Spirit of Place Exhibit

I have submitted three pieces to the 2015 Spirit of Place event now in progress at the Heritage House in downtown Westport, NY.

The first is a small wall hanging titled Waking Up Beside You In The Dark.  It is assembled from a melted Cuisinart and broken shards of Christmas tree ornaments from my childhood.  It was more than a decade ago that I spent a week or two melting and burning a whole range of household appliances and electrical equipment in a search for new forms.  My young friend Kyle Blemel who was working with me that summer abetted me in this project.  (Apparently our exercise in destruction did him no harm as he is now a successful industrial designer.)  However the only new forms that emerged were rather gross and useless except for this white piece which lived for years on the barn wall as a fascinating grotesque before it fell and broke two years ago suddenly revealing the grinning skeleton riding on a skull.  Then just this spring I added the broken ornaments.

The second piece, also a junk sculpture, is intended for installation in a garden pool or pond, or perhaps a gentle stream.  It should rest on a large flat rock just at water level.  It is titled Birds Feeding and happened suddenly this spring when I was given the strange thing that appears to be a manually operated auger.  I entangled the auger with an unidentified object I had pulled out of the swamp when I first moved here, and then I added the golden ornament that was in play because of the work on Waking Up Beside You In The Dark.

The third piece, a portrait of winter in my wetland, is a small oil on panel I called Styx because I was reading around in a strange multi-author translation of Dante’s Inferno I had borrowed from the wonderful Wadhams Free Library.  It is the most recent of the many photo-realistic paintings I have made. 

I work from small prints of photos I have taken, sometimes dozens of the same subject.  The small size of the photo print provides a rigorous focus.  I go back to the painting again and again over as much as a year, often examining the print I have chosen with a magnifying glass.  I find many gestures in the print where it seemed at first there was only one, many different perspectives, different visual stories buried there.  When I am fortunate the painting, usually itself quite large allowing room for all I have discovered, seems to hover and breathe.

One of these large format paintings now hangs in the meeting room of the Essex Town Hall.  It is called Election Day, and I introduce it here to talk about another facet of my work that is central to my experience with the spirit of this place.

Election Day, oil on panel, 35”x 48”, 1996

I think of this painting as depicting three constituents of life on Earth. In order of seniority and specific gravity they are the ancient rock, the numberless grasses and constitutional democracy.

I think of democracy as being represented in the painting by the unknown that lies over the hill. That is what I like best about our Election Day, the convivial manner in which we confront the unknown and all toss our futures into the air together. It seems uniquely modern to me, joyfully scientific, that we should have a public celebration of uncertainty.

So my work has a philosophical bent.   As a theater director in New York, I was an early associate of Joe Papp, impresario of the famously radical and obstreperous New York Shakespeare Festival and Public Theater.  It was at the Public that I directed the first off-Broadway play to win a Pulitzer Prize.  Later I won an Obie for myself, working at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.  But more than anything I loved the big tough city and came to know it from many angles.  I was a single parent, drove a cab, taught acting, won a rent strike, was a freight brakeman on the Penn Central Railroad, and part of an investment banking firm with its offices at One World Trade Center.  We specialized in creating privately placed, tax-exempt bonds for rural health care institutions.

I loved the action, loved being in the big world, but more and more I came to feel that we were losing ground, the city was changing in bad ways, that everything we did somehow didn’t matter. These feelings, whether hormonal, doctrinal, or simply very private are common enough in the human story, a powerful force. In my case the response to a growing distemper was, after a lot of looking both inward and outward, to put my art-self in a direct, creative, unmediated relationship with the wilderness and civilization of the Adirondacks.  I wanted to be formed not by the conventions of the world power center in New York, however magnificent, but by the instinct for bravery, freedom and mutual caring as it is lived here up north in the cold.  I wanted to enter this landscape to be changed by it and work to create a refuge here in an increasingly difficult world.  Of course I was not alone.

My eclectic background has allowed me to be of help in the restoration and growth of the Wadhams Free Library, “the little library with a big window on the world”, also in the re-writing of the Town Plan and Zoning Ordinance for the town of Essex in my role as Planning Board Chair, and the regeneration of the Whallonsburg Grange Hall now celebrating its Centennial as a vibrant community center and cultural engine in the Boquet valley.

But getting back to junk.  Rusted junk has an honored place here.  Life can be hard.  We know how to make do, to improvise.  Brooklyn where I lived for thirty years is another place that understands junk and hard times.  Broken refugees recover there, and then their children grow up to write great music and Broadway plays.

As for me, I love junk and always have.  I remember as a boy finding something in the grass and wondering where it came from and how it got that way.  Junk has memory and junk suggests possibilities. I love it because it talks to us about our common origins, how we all come from a long line of junk.  I love it because it awakens unknown futures.  Our very sun is a junk star, made of the debris of earlier stars. 

Regeneration, the indomitable growth of new life from old, is for me the spirit of this place.

Please visit me at the Art Farm on the CATS Art Farm Trail outside of Wadhams.  See some monumental junk sculpture and other fine art in a gorgeous setting.

Ted Cornell
518 962 4386

The Memory Tree (2013) at the Art Farm.

Amazing Weekend at the Art Farm

Here is Kathy Recchia's report on the wonderful Columbus Day weekend at the Art Farm.

Spring Comes to the Art Farm

On the 24th of April, Ted gave an illustrated lecture at the Wadhams Free Library describing past and present springtime work at his art farm in Wadhams. The Art Farm is now open by appointment (call 962 4386) and will be open to the public later in June. 

Lecture at Wadhams Free Library

 

Above is the Library's poster for Ted's lecture.

Open Studio at Crooked Brook

Here are some scenes from yesterday's studio tour. It was really nice to see everybody undeterred by the rain.

We are open again today from 10 AM to 5 PM. The weather promises to be a brighter today. We look forward to seeing you.

 

Photos by Kathryn Cramer.

Boquet Valley Studio Tour Coming Up

I have been working all summer refurbishing the house and grounds. Now I am looking forward to opening the place up briefly on the Boquet Valley Studio Tour coming up October 6 and 7. There won't be any brand new stuff, but I"m bringing up some favorite pieces that haven't been on view for a while. The Angel of Inerrancy is back home thanks to Jim Morse and his crew, and the house will be open showing off my new teaching studio and and a more intimate exhibition space upstairs. This fall I will again be teaching acting, but in a somewhat different group format - more about that later - and soon adding a video capability. A best of all I look forward to painting again - all winter. I look forward to seeing you soon.

Acting classes with Edward Cornell at Crooked Brook Studios will begin again in early May.

Scene Study Classes

Scene study classes in groups of six will resume Thursday evening May 3rd and places may be claimed now. A student is required to commit to eight two-hour classes at a cost of $220 per person for the eight weeks. Students begin with a monologue and then join with a partner to work on a scene. Scenes and monologues are chosen either from Shakespeare or modern classics of the last hundred years and are selected with the student to meet particular goals. Ted is available for consultation outside of class and his studios can be used for scene rehearsal by arrangement. Additional meeting days, perhaps on the weekend, are under consideration.

Smaller group classes are available for children by special arrangement.

Call Ted for further information or to sign up.



Individual and Paired Study

Opportunities for individual and paired study at a basic rate of $100 per hour are also offered. Discounts are available for students, seniors and by special arrangement. These classes include spatial and movement work, character study and vocal training as well as monologue and scene study. Courses of study can be designed to meet particular needs and challenges.



The teaching philosophy is eclectic and need based, with a foundation in what is commonly called the Method. Mr. Cornell trained at the Yale Drama School with Stella Adler and pursued a career in New York as a director before moving to the Adirondacks. He was an early associate of Joseph Papp at the Public Theatre and taught acting at NYU, Circle in the Square, Hofstra University, Ohio University and The Actors Studio. He is an Obie Award winner. Former professional associates include Ellen Burstyn, Olympia Dukakis, Raul Julia, Al Pacino, & Martin Sheen.

The work is rigorous, offering an opportunity for meaningful self-examination and dramatic change. It has proven useful not only to actors but to writers, professionals and students.