What do you do on the day you release the cultiest of cult beers in a special-edition can designed by an illustrator-artist with a growing following? You call the cops.

Tree House Brewing in the western Massachusetts town of Monson did just that recently to control the throngs descending on its dirt parking lot over the latest sporadic release of a beer called the Juice Machine. Craft beer drinkers are fanatical about this six-year-old rural brewery, the entirety of whose sales come from its on-premise retail store. It produces 14 of the 50 highest-rated beers on BeerAdvocate.

Like most Tree House beers, the Juice Machine is an American double IPA: very hoppy, very potent—and also very hazy according to what some consider a distinct, Northeast IPA sub-style associated with Tree House and its sought-after eastern-Mass peer Trillium.

Unlike most Tree House beers, the Juice Machine comes in a can with a robot on it. “I redid the robot from Lost in Space—he’s possessed by the beer and the fruit,” says illustrator and craft-beer fan Dean McKeever. The “fruit” is a play on both the prominent citrus and tropical notes associated with uber-hopped American IPAs, and the fact that these beers are so opaque they resemble orange juice.

“People flip out for [the Juice Machine],” says McKeever. He recalls the parking lot looking “like a Patriots game” when it was last released.

No. 29, photo by Nate Lanier

There’s also a fair amount of flipping out happening over Tree House’s Curiosity beers—single-release brews named simply after their number in the sequence. There have been 35 so far, and McKeever, who earned a bachelor of fine arts at UMass-Dartmouth in 2008, has designed unique labels for each release beginning with number 18.

Number 32, photo by Nate Lanier

He collaborates with Tree House brewer and cofounder Nate Lanier on the ideas for the cans. Dean Rohan, another cofounder, says, “They have a little bit of a theme behind them: They’re natural, woodsy.” And they are truly collector’s items, as evidenced by the robust online trade of Curiosity cans, whether they’re full or empty. Tree House no longer announces the release of these beers because of the aforementioned crowd-control issues.

Number 18, photo by Nate Lanier

The Curiosity cans are more representative of McKeever’s style, which is rooted in nature: mountains, trees, cabins emitting wisps of chimney smoke. He names both Van Gogh and Bob “The Joy of Painting” Ross as inspirations. “I’m inspired by vintage elements, illustrations from the ‘50s and ‘60s,” he says. “I try not to beat my work to death with too much color or line work.” At the same time, he adds, “I try to create a lot of depth—the illusion that there’s three dimensions.” All of these influences and intentions came together as the Curiosity series entered its thirties.

“I’m really stoked to be a freelance artist,” McKeever says. “A lot of it is because of my connection with Tree House.”

Number 25, photo by Nate Lanier

McKeever lives in East Longmeadow, only about a half-hour drive from Monson. (Tree House is building a second facility in Charlton that will greatly expand its capacity.) When he’s not designing labels for Tree House or other breweries—including Tioga Sequoia in California and Haint Blue in Alabama—he designs skateboard decks for Theory in Northampton and Hoodlum in Hartford, and shows his prints around western Massachusetts.

Check out McKeever’s work at Beerology in Northampton and at the Made in Massachusetts Festival at the Big E July 8 and 9. Or check him out on Instagram, where the artist’s Wednesday night “live draws” have a growing audience.

Dean McKeever–illustrator
Easthampton, Massachusetts
Website
Instagram
Facebook
Twitter

Images by Nate Lanier

The post The Art of the Can appeared first on Take Magazine.

The painted wooden sign was one of New England’s earliest art forms, starting back when colonial innkeepers lured customers with bold hand-lettering and eye-catching imagery such as bulls, lions, and goblets.

Portland, Maine artist Will Sears has a thing for wooden signs. His company Better Letter Hand Painted Signs makes signs for restaurants, shops, farms, and other small businesses that evoke the look of commerce in the early 20th century. But when it comes to Sears’ art, the medium is the message.

“My fine art is very closely tied to sign painting,” he says. Recent works involve sawing his own hand-painted, pre-weathered wooden signs into pieces, then re-assembling them to create really cool Americana-inspired abstract patterns.

Born and raised in Philadelphia, the 27 year old also does paintings and collages that cheekily combine hand lettering with old newspaper images, business stationery, blueprints, pornography, and photos from CPR manuals. Shortly after graduating from Syracuse University in 2010, he landed in Portland via a residency for young artists led by prominent sculptor John Bisbee.

“I really loved New England – my dad grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire,” says Sears, who also spent summers at Camp Belknap on Lake Winnipesaukee. “Before I knew it, it was home.”

Sears helped design the Oxbow Brewery’s taproom in Portland. Photo by Bret Labelle Photography

Sears is entrepreneurial, moving comfortably in and out of the commercial and artistic worlds. That’s also true of some of his clients, a major one being the local Oxbow Brewing Company of Newcastle and Portland. These days, where there is an art scene, there is usually also a craft brewery (or three). The artisanship behind Oxbow’s Belgian farmhouse ale-inspired brews is reflected in Sears-designed labels, as well as wall murals in the Newcastle brewery and, in the Portland taproom, barstool tops made from – you guessed it – wooden signs.

Sears is excited to be co-curating a show this summer called Ode to Letters through the Biddeford, Maine art collective Engine. “It’s a three-part show of work – graffiti art, sign painting, and letterpress – that exhibits a love for letters,” he explains. And he and his girlfriend, artist Tessa Greene O’Brien, recently received a grant through the Space Gallery’s Kindling Fund to start a mural initiative in Portland – one with a focus on contemporary art.

“It’s a chance to bring contemporary art, which might not be found outside of a museum or a gallery, to a public forum,” Sears says. Now, that’s a good sign.

The artist with his installation of sculpture and signage at Portland’s Space Gallery. Photo by Bret Labelle Photography

The article first appeared on the Take site on February 18th, 2015.

Will Sears and Better Letter Hand Painted Signs are on Instagram and facebook.

The post It’s a Sign appeared first on Take Magazine.

If you were Washington, DC’s go-to stone carver for inscribing calligraphy into national monuments, you might kick back and rest on your laurels. Not Nicholas Benson. The craftsman at the top of his venerated analog trade is using his skill to make art that explores the meaning of the digital world.

Nicholas Benson, Air | slate tablet carved with “Lorem ipsum,” Yale University Art Gallery

At a time when almost all stone-cut lettering is done by machines, Benson still carves his by hand using brushstrokes to outline each letterform. His work graces buildings and monuments across the United States, including the National World War II Memorial and the Dr. Martin Luther King National Memorial, for which Benson designed a new font blending classic and modern styles.

He learned to carve letters in stone from his father, John Everett Benson, who learned from his father, John Howard Benson. The first two Bensons worked on the U.S. Marine Corps’ Iwo Jima Memorial, the National Gallery of Art, and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial. The three generations have run the John Stevens Shop in Newport, Rhode Island, since the 1920s, although the shop has been doing business on Thames Street for 310 years.

Nicholas Benson, R for Ann

No one else in the country does specifically what the John Stevens Shop does, says Benson. “We’re type designers, calligraphers, and we’re also the ones who execute the work. [Most other] outfits have graphic designers, then the stone carvers execute the letters.” For this combination of skills and for his sheer talent, Benson was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (a “genius grant”) in 2010.

“The fellowship allowed me to delve into artistic, expressive stuff I’ve been wanting to do for a long time,” Benson says. “I’m taking the expertise that goes into the craft and the calligraphic form, and expressing stuff of my own—with strong emphasis on the aesthetic. It’s the visual quality of the thing that strikes you first, and not the written message. There’s a message of the form itself.”

Nicholas Benson

To make that point, he inscribed onto a slate tablet a paragraph of graceful calligraphy that consists of Lorem Ipsum, the nonsensical placeholder text often used in publishing. In another recent exploration of the indecipherable, Benson carved his interpretation of the Standard Model of the universe based on the Higgs boson particle; he was inspired by the documentary Particle Fever. And he has just started a project inscribing Base64 computer code into stone. It’ll no doubt be captivating even to non-programmers.

“I did a really fun talk at Google in New York,” Benson says. “The whole idea was getting me in there to talk about the analog. I’m getting more and more interest in what I do.” In turn, he is creating art that springs from “a lot of thought around the ramifications of the information age … the notion of the indecipherable but complicated deluge of information we get every day. I’m trying to shed light on that.”

Follow Nicholas Benson on twitter and instagram.

This article originally appeared in our February/March 2016 Print issue.

All photos by Ian Barnard

The post Carving Artist appeared first on Take Magazine.

Even if you’ve never ridden a motorcycle, you find yourself wanting to pick up this gorgeous, independent magazine on vintage-bike culture. As you leaf through enticingly photographed articles about treks through Indonesia, handmade leather boots, or an adman-turned-microdistiller, you might wonder where this bookshelf-worthy journal in your hands comes from. London? Los Angeles? Nope. Manchester, New Hampshire.

Granite State native Brett Houle launched Iron & Air in 2012 after selling his email marketing company, SendLabs. The concept started out as an Instagram feed, then a Facebook page that attracted thousands of likes. Before long, Houle, editor-in-chief Adam Fitzgerald, and digital director Greg Moore were responding to their followers’ demand for a magazine dedicated to the concept they were cultivating on social media. Issues 1 through 3 were digital. With issue 4, the print publication was born.
“They want something in tangible form,” Fitzgerald says of Iron & Air’s audience. “They work with their hands. They’re craftspeople and motorsports enthusiasts. They care about where their stuff comes from, how it’s made.”

The quarterly has tapped into the international revival of “café racer” culture centered on “motorcycles that look like something out of an old Steve McQueen movie,” as Popular Mechanics recently put it. “These bikes revive the 1960s café-racer look made popular when European kids stripped down their small-displacement bikes to zip from one café hangout to another.”

“We don’t like to think of ourselves as a motorcycle magazine,” says Fitzgerald. “It’s about the motorcycle and the places it takes us—the adventures, the trips, the people you meet, the clothes you wear when you’re on the road.” Indeed, the name of the magazine came from Houle’s desire to describe his favorite things, motorcycles and mountains, in more evocative terms.

The editorial team has lit upon non-motorcycle topics that strike a chord with Iron & Air readers as the publication has “matured,” says Fitzgerald, chuckling as Moore winces over a word that is about as attractive to a biker as “minivan.” A recent feature, for example, looked at an exhibit of obscure photographs by the film director Stanley Kubrick. Issue 22, which came out this spring, is entirely devoted to the gritty romance of a 10,000-mile trip around the American West on Russian-made Ural sidecar motorbikes.

“We take advantage of the fact that we are an independent publication,” says Fitzgerald. “We push boundaries. Who’s going to stop us?

THIS PIECE FIRST APPEARED OUR JUNE/JULY 2016 PRINT ISSUE AVAILABLE HERE

Images courtesy of Iron & Air

The post Live to Ride appeared first on Take Magazine.

A series of sketches by the artist Eben Kling depicts scenes from the TV western Gunsmoke: James Arness, the rugged actor who starred as Marshal Matt Dillon, roughing up a boy; a gunman peering from behind a lookout who is either sweating profusely or sobbing; a cowboy grimacing while getting gut punched by an attacker whose torso twists in slow motion.

Drawn against minimal backgrounds in colorful pencil and crayon, these pictures are both dramatic and cartoonish—ironic in an N. C. Wyeth-meets-National Lampoon way.

“My father was kind of a tough guy,” Kling says. “He would watch Gunsmoke, and I would sit on the floor drawing. The images are sort of redacted and edited through my hand. I was picking at the machismo.”

Botched Response 2015 | 61×50 Acrylic and Pencil on Canvas

Unlike the Gunsmoke sketches, Kling’s paintings lean more abstract. From party scenes to protests, they are trippy narratives composed of often contorted or fragmentary figures with meaty hands and feet, mouths agape, angular sunglasses, baseball caps with foam-like brims, fat cigarettes, beer cans, and pizza boxes. There’s a dash of R. Crumb and a pinch of Terry Gilliam in Kling’s style, humor, and social commentary. But they’re blended into an already-rich batter of latchkey-kid angst, visionary talent, and screw-it-all experimentation.

“A lot of those images were made as I was sitting in public, drawing,” he says. “I was feeling confused about what I was looking at.”

Over the past six years, the 28-year-old has created an impressive body of work—painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, illustration, and commercial art—featured in dozens of shows. His master of fine arts show at UMass Amherst in May attracted 200 people. Artspace, a New Haven, Connecticut, gallery and nonprofit for emerging contemporary artists, chose Kling as its 2015–2016 artist-in-residence.

The works in Kling’s MFA show evolved out of “chance strategies—a very John Cage thing,” he says. For example, he created compositions of random digital images using Photoshop’s auto-align feature, then “flattened and rendered them in [his] own hand” as brightly colored paintings.

Kling likes portraying, and employing, the mundane stuff of everyday life. He’ll build a cheeky collage around a strategically placed piece of Day-Glo card stock. His sculpture is just as irreverent; his preferred media are trash and cardboard. He once collaborated on a show, Odd Job, in the office of an abandoned tech company, making sculpture in which he personified casually assembled piles of office detritus by giving them limbs and heads.

“It looked like [the company] left in the middle of a Christmas party,” Kling says. “There was a strange, purgatorial feel to it.”

Floating Cluster Fuck 2015 |48×48 Acrylic and Pencil on Canvas

Another sculpture series consists of figures partially cut out of cardboard. They lie on the floor, their limbs flopping about in tortuous positions. Or, Kling will fasten a cardboard figure to a wall, adding objects like a pair of tighty-whities and a pistol, with a pile of papier-mȃché beer cans and pink dismembered limbs littering the floor below. It’s like stop-motion animation come to life.

I talked to Kling about his work and life just after he and his girlfriend, artist and Royal Frog Ballet performer Chelsea Granger, moved into his late father’s house in the Connecticut shore town of Branford, near New Haven. He’s the fourth generation of Kling to live there.

“I feel like a steward. The house functions as a vibrating museum of my family’s history,” he says. The statement sounds like a platitude, but, as usual, it is “redacted and edited” through the artist’s hand. A series of photos on Kling’s Tumblr feed is simply captioned: “Images made from my late father’s pornography and his landscape photography.”

LC: Your dad died a couple of years ago. The Gunsmoke drawings are connected to him?

I didn’t want to be sentimental about our relationship, but I felt compelled to make work about my father’s death. James Arness is a catalyst to talk about my own relationship with my father— through power struggles, machismo, complicated male-type things. But it’s tempered with absurdity and a sense of humor.

LC: Moving to New Haven was sort of mission for you, huh? You must have been psyched to get the artist-in-residence gig at Artspace.

Yeah. [Artspace] is a cultural mothership of creative people in New Haven, and it’s part of a block of low-income housing. I can’t think of a more appropriate way to integrate back into New Haven. I’m committed to being here. I was born in New Haven. I moved out at a young age—my parents divorced when I was four. But I gravitated back to it.

Before I was 18, I lived in 18 different apartments. It was kind of funny—a lot of times, the new apartment was just literally down the street, or upstairs. [Having grown] up in southern Connecticut, [I find] there’s something alluring about New Haven. It’s a city. I went to Amity High School in Woodbridge, but I was also commuting to New Haven every day to go to an arts magnet school.

I wasn’t very good in [traditional] school. I spent a lot of time drawing during my classes and was always scolded for it.

Eben Kling | Photo by Paul Teeling

I had a very influential teacher, Brian Flynn, in high school. We’re still in close contact. He was a very encouraging guy, and he liked to challenge me. He inflated my ego when I needed it. He was the one who convinced me to keep doing art. I don’t think my mother ever wanted me to go into the arts. My father really tried to talk me out of it. It wasn’t until college that he came around.

LC: You went to an arts college?

My first year was at Hartford Art School with 15,000 other students. I was an arrogant person. I thought I had some chops; I thought I was going to be an artist. My professors knocked me down a few pegs. I didn’t connect with the city. I went to HAS because my girlfriend went there. Then my girlfriend left me, and my car got stolen. That’s when I transferred to Montserrat [College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts]. It was a nice change of speed. At the time, I needed that sort of intimacy.

I started off in illustration. While I was at Montserrat, I was getting a lot of work as an illustrator. I worked for an after-school science program in Cape Ann. It was steady work that paid me well, but it was a funny job. I made incredibly convoluted images. There would be a historical
anecdote, like one about the development of hydraulic electrical motors just after World War II. In that illustration, there were figures in the foreground—desperate people making a radio out of an old washing machine—and a war scene in the background. [The program managers] would assign me five images in two days. It was probably the most unprofessional experience I could have had out of the gate.

I switched my major to printmaking. Peers of mine who were inspiring to me happened to be in that department. I was doing lithography, acid etching, wood prints. It was like a big survey. Everybody had to work around each other—it was a shop. There’s something very colorful and enthusiastic about being in a laboratory together.

LC: What did you do after you graduated?

I moved down to the Pioneer Valley right after Montserrat. There were close to 12 Montserrat alumni living there. But many of my friends and peers were going to New York and California. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed recent art grads. I didn’t want to move to a large metropolis.

LC: What made you decide to go back to school and get an MFA?

I was walking up the stairs of the restaurant I was working in as a prep cook, and I was carrying a 15-pound sack of potatoes. I hurt my back. I was tired, working long hours in the service industry. I decided I wanted to go back to school.

I always had a suspicion I wanted to teach—the most inspiring people in my life have been teachers. At UMass, that suspicion was validated. Maybe not teaching in the most conventional sense . . . more like collaboration. Teasing out ideas with other human beings. I’m more interested in that than being some sort of famous artist.

LC: Really? You might not have much choice in the matter. You’re prolific. Let’s talk about your work. You do collages, and you also do paintings that look like collages.

I did a small series of images that were a mix of painting, found objects, and cut material. I thought, “How can I make an image that is familiar to me without paint?” I was sick of painting.

I had spent a lot of time going through my father’s house. He was a hoarder. I was feeling the burden of being the only son; the burden of his belongings, his trash. That’s when I began experimenting with sculpture. I think about Claes Oldenburg’s The Store. He rented a bodega and made objects that he sold. I started doing similar things. I made symbols for beer cans out of ventilated foam. My studio started to look like my father’s garage.

Even some of my paintings have a sort of stitched-together quality. Certain images might be . . . I haven’t figured out what they are. Dissociative forms, people’s behavior, motivations. I was feeling cynical, blank, looking through people’s actions and their objects. I was intentionally using divergence tactics . . . not being able to see where something ended.

Up All Night for Late Night 2015 | 48×48 Acrylic and Pencil on Canvas

LC: Beer cans and cigarettes are a motif in your work.

They’re symbols of debauchery. I smoke cigarettes and drink a lot of beer. I go to bars and socialize in that way. It’s part of my life. I hark back to one of my favorite painters, Philip Guston. [The motifs are] a wink to him. When I go back and think about those paintings more, there’s a sort of condemnation of debauchery.

In graduate school, I would sit in the studio and listen to Democracy Now!, then go out into the zoo of UMass. Or I would sit in a mall and draw people going up and down on an escalator for about an hour. Time-lapsed images of faces. Everybody’s on their cell phone, eating a giant hot dog, drinking sodas, and buying sneakers. There’s a lot of consumerist angst [in those images]. I felt like I was holding a mirror up. But I would also implicate myself at the same time.

LC: What about your influences? You’ve mentioned R. Crumb and Philip Guston. I get hints of Terry Gilliam in your work.

Everything is derivative. The responsibility of an artist is not to avoid that lineage but insert [oneself] into it, modernize it. I love [Gilliam’s] films. He’s in the soup stock. A lot of my influence comes from television and cartoons. I was a latchkey kid—free to watch as much TV as I wanted. I still watch cartoons all the time. There’s something about the expressiveness and plasticity of cartoons that is an established tool for exaggeration. It’s a really good strategy to make your point and push it over the edge.

I think about when I started making cardboard cutout images. They were kind of pathetic. They had no structural integrity. They would bend in ways that were eerily reminiscent of human joints—figures collapsing over themselves. Some of my peers refer to them as Transformers. It’s as if they went through a time machine and came through the other side compromised.

LC: One cool project you’ve worked on recently is Jedediah Berry’s The Family Arcana, which the project’s website describes as “a story about a haunted family, published as a poker deck and written to be read an infinite number of ways.”

I’m doing the illustrations for it. It’s a story and a functional deck of cards. Jed and I used to live together in Amherst. I’ve also dabbled in tattoo artistry for a friend who has his own tattoo shop.

Now that school is over, I’m kind of let off the leash. I feel like a real boy again.

Eben Kling | Photo by Paul Teeling

Kling’s Artspace residency culminates in a solo show. Humanoids, an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Eben Kling opens Oct 7, 2016 – Nov 10, 2016.

Artspace
50 Orange St.
New Haven, CT 06510
203.772.2709
info@artspacenh.org

Images courtesy of the artist

The post I Was Confused About What I Was Looking At appeared first on Take Magazine.

The Schilling Beer Company in Littleton, New Hampshire opened in 2013 when brothers Jeff Cozzens (terrorism studies guy) and Stuart Cozzens (seminary graduate) and their longtime friend, John Lenzini (chemist), left their careers behind to realize their dream of being craft brewers.

Schilling occupies a two centuries–old former grist mill along the Ammonoosuc River—an impressive building in an already-picturesque New England town. On the edge of the White Mountains, Littleton is the kind of place that periodically makes those “best small towns in America” lists.

That’s one of the reasons Jeff moved to the area from Washington, DC, several years ago after working in homeland security. He and his wife thought it would be a good place to raise their kids. Stuart and John visited and decided they liked it too. The partners are all outdoorsmen who grew up in Traverse City, Michigan. “We’re hikers, we’re fly fishermen,” says Jeff. “We love the mountains, and we love small-town living.”

Head brewer John, who began homebrewing in 1997 and spent several years in Germany, is good at what he does. He specializes in beer styles from continental Europe, which cover quite a range: lagers light and dark; Kölsch (a crisp German ale); Gose (another German style brewed with wheat and salt); and Belgian ales that range from spritzy, tart saisons to rich, Trappist-style brews. The beers pair well with a variety of delicious pizzas made with local ingredients in a wood-fired oven.

Schilling beers can seem unusual to non–beer geeks, and they buck the continued dominance of hoppy IPAs. The owners know it is part of their job to educate the clientele “in a region where you don’t get that ‘craft’ culture as much,” says Jeff. That was part of the appeal, adds Stuart, who says, “Seeing how many beer drinkers there were per capita in New Hampshire, and how both Maine and Vermont were light-years ahead [in the craft beer realm] . . . it seemed like a wise business move.”*

*Beer Marketer’s Insights ranks New Hampshire 2nd among all states in per capita beer consumption. The Brewers Association ranks New Hampshire 15th in per capita craft beer consumption, and Vermont and Maine 1st and 7th, respectively.

Top photo by John A. Downey

The post A Brewery to Brag About appeared first on Take Magazine.

Dalton Ghetti takes months, even years, to meticulously carve tiny sculptures out of pencil graphite. The artist, who is a carpenter and volleyball coach by day, says the process starts with sketches on paper. Then he selects one of the many discarded pencils he finds on the street, whittles away some of the wood, and starts sculpting the exposed graphite. He might drop a project for a while and come back to it.

“I don’t do it every day,” he says. “I can’t work more than an hour or hour and a half. My eyes get tired.” It’s a wonder he can do it that long, given the focus and fine control involved in using sewing needles and modified scalpels—and aided only by reading glasses and a strong light—to create, say, a tiny graphite hammer or boot. And then there’s the fact, as anyone who has over-sharpened a pencil knows, that graphite breaks.

“I usually start a piece knowing it’s going to break—that takes the anxiety and stress out of the work,” says Ghetti, who lives in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He began the pencil sculptures not long after migrating to the United States from Brazil in 1985 at the age of 24.

‘Screw,’ graphite and wood | Photo by Sloan T. Howard

“I’m having more success lately than I did 10 or 15 years ago,” he says, “I think because I changed the way I work. I’m more relaxed now. Before, I was a little too tense trying not to break [the graphite]. Anytime something breaks, I learn a lesson from it. I’ll try to create the same piece again, and when I come to the part where it broke, I’m more careful.” Ghetti has even learned to control his breathing while sculpting, lest his heartbeat perturb the precision of his hands.

His work currently appears in the Springfield Museums’ Leaving Our Mark: In Celebration of the Pencil, an exhibition of 15 artists who work in graphite that runs through March 2016 in Springfield, Massachusetts. His sculptures have also exhibited recently in Turkey, Canada, and Baltimore as well as at the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut.

Ghetti sells postcards and posters of his artwork, but the sculptures themselves are not for sale. His art is purely personal, not commercial, he explains. “When I’m inspired, it’s wonderful.” But, he adds, “It’s a hobby. I work for a living.”

Photo at top: ‘Chain,’ graphite and wood | Photo by Sloan T. Howard

The post Pencil It In appeared first on Take Magazine.

The more the world goes digital, the more some New Englanders are embracing analog art and technology.

Take Justin Crowther, who plays drums for Burlington, Vermont’s “outlaw dirt rock” band Waylon Speed and who opened Burlington Records last year. In our latest issue, he tells us the story of how he and his partners salvaged an old vinyl-pressing machine from Germany. Now they cannot make records fast enough to keep up with demand from fellow musicians.

Sign painters Will Sears of Portland, Shawn Gilheeney of Providence, and Josh Luke of Boston explain how they’re reviving the “lost” art of the handpainted sign. “It’s really hard to be good at,” says Sears, an artist who also produced original work for this issue, including our cover. “You have to have brush skills. You have to know your materials. You have to be able to produce beautiful-looking letters with your hands. It’s design. It’s advertising. It’s color theory. It’s this physical thing.”

The age-old art of storytelling is also having a moment, as our profile of Matthew Dicks demonstrates. He has made a career of standing on a stage alone with a microphone and entertaining the hell out of audiences with tales as profound as almost dying and as weird as “sex and frozen corn.”

In keeping with the analog spirit, we look at the revival of Doing It Yourself rather than leaving it to mass production and the supply chain. It does not get more DIY than two Vermont bakeries — Red Hen Baking Company and Elmore Mountain Bread — that are not only successfully producing “slow bread” but also creating a market for local wheat growers.

Plus, we feature stories of New Englanders making hats, stone carvings, surfboards, pencil sculptures, and coffee makers. And dancing on a frozen pond in Maine.

If you’d like to read the Analog (February/March) issue, pick up a copy on our website!

Top photo|cover art by Will Sears

The post Obsolete, My Ass appeared first on Take Magazine.

Cotton wittily but harmlessly pokes fun at the police and their work, from apprehending runaway dogs to putting drunk drivers in “the Bed and Breakfast facility at the Sheriff ’s Office.” His posts have been picked up by NPR, CNN, and Time, among other media outlets.

“When I started [in spring 2014], we were at 9,000 likes,” he recalls. “I said, ‘The page sucks. Let’s show the human side of police officers. Cops are funny as the dickens.’”

A weekly series of posts he calls “Got Warrants?” chronicles police activity with tidbits like this: “A car pulled over on Main Street for changing lanes in an improper manner contained a woman with an arrest warrant. She was driving. She went to jail. She was nice.”

If Cotton sets out to show that cops are human, he does the same with arrestees, whom he never identifies. “We don’t make fun of criminals. Everyone’s got their own past.”

He was scared. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Officer Keith Larby really felt he was being followed. No matter where he went on his beat, it was right there behind him.

When he stopped in order to speak to the engineer about what he believed was a train following him,he realized it was the super moon over the Queen City.

He took a picture and asked me not to tell anyone his initial fears.

I felt it was therapeutic to talk it through for him on Facebook.

Thanks for the photo Officer Larby. I won’t share the photo of your arm raised while you pumped it up and down trying to the engineer to blow the air horn for you. That would be inappropriate.

The men and women of the Bangor Police Department will be here.

– Photo and text from the Bangor PD’s September 27, 2015 Facebook post.

Follow the Bangor Maine Police Department on Facebook

The post Spit Take: The Thin Blue Line appeared first on Take Magazine.

Our mission, in a nutshell, is to cover arts and culture that look to New England’s present and future, rather than its past. We seek to capture the character of New England contemporary arts and culture, and the people who are creating it.

If you’re a writer, photographer, illustrator, videographer, podcaster or other creative thing that we don’t know the name of but that might contribute something interesting to Take online or in print, we want your ideas and talents. And we want contributors and ideas from all over New England. I’m talking to you, Pine Tree, Granite, Green Mountain, Bay, Ocean and Constitution staters. Check out those guidelines and be in touch.

Read the full guidelines here.

The post So You Think You Have a Story Idea? appeared first on Take Magazine.