No matter which way you look at it, Susan Gaylord’s journey started with words. Her early and lasting relationship with books gave her companionship and a tool for learning about and connecting with the world around her. While she went on to major in English literature in college, her practices in art post graduation took her beyond the meaning of words to their form through calligraphy, book making, and writing.

A New Jersey native, Gaylord first lived in New England when she transferred to Boston University for her last two years of college. “I fell in love with its scale and its palpable sense of history as well as its color coded subways, wildflowers growing in the trolley tracks, and clam chowder with cream,” she says of her immediate love for Boston’s urban offerings. Gaylord has remained here in Massachusetts ever since.

“I love living in the part of the country where Dickinson, Thoreau, Emerson, and Whittier among many others lived and worked,” Gaylord says. She identifies with these literary greats and “their sense that the glory of nature can be found equally in something as small as a flower and as large as a mountain or as vast as the sea,” all of which are easily found in the varietal landscapes of New England. “I have spent more than half my life in the Merrimack Valley, first in the Lowell area where I began my life in the arts and immersed myself in the writing of Jack Kerouac, and then in Newburyport, where the river meets the sea, for the past 32.”

After 10 years of a calligraphy career, commercial work began to bore Gaylord. Through exploration of different mediums, surfaces, and fabrics, she discovered the book form that led her to her next arts adventure. Gaylord became a bookmaking teacher, preaching the art to 30,000 students and teachers over the years. “I came to see that what teachers needed were ways to work within the curriculum. Most of the books I taught in schools were designed to make learning facts and concepts and doing research fun,” Gaylord says.

The culmination of Gaylord’s work is visible in what she calls Spirit Books, where “words” exist at the abstract intersection of the history of books as testaments of faith and belief and nature. These wordless books were inspired by a massive pruning on Gaylord’s property. “We cut grape and blackberry vines, wild roses, honeysuckle, and old lilacs, and made a giant mound on our driveway,” she says. “As we handled the pieces to remove them, I felt such an attraction to them that I brought some into my studio.” Four years later came the Spirit Books—delicate, sculptural, but maintaining a mechanical “bookness.” The Spirit Books use their natural elements to tell the story. Each unique page speaks for itself, without words. “I like to think they can be read as meditation,” Gaylord says.

Spirit Book | Courtesy of Susan Gaylord

“My compulsion to do my work and to share it comes from some inner drive. I have to create the things I do and I am not content with just making them; I have to share them too,” says Gaylord, “but I don’t really have a plan about what I want to communicate or what kind of impact I want my work to have. I’m not sure why, but I think it may have something to do with the fact that I have always tried to let the work shape itself and lead me rather than the other way around.”

Susan Gaylord–artist
Newburyport, Massachusetts
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Looking at the building that houses Wingate Studio’s impressive collection of meticulously maintained vintage printing equipment, it’s hard to imagine the business could exist anywhere but New England. Inhabiting a converted barn on a 55-acre family farm that practically straddles three states from its location at the convergence of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, the 31-year-old print studio could double as a stage set for The Crucible.

Wingate Farms

Wingate Studio founder Peter Pettengill’s family has occupied the land for generations. His parents still live in the old farmhouse and his daughter, Olivia (along with partner Susie Parke-Sutherland), has revived the land back into a working farm that grows spinach, flowers, and summer greens, and is home to 900 egg-producing chickens and 8 pigs. A dog named Busy keeps things in order.

For a seven-year spell, however, Pettengill lived in San Francisco, where he attained the title of master printer at the city’s distinguished Crown Point Press and met his wife Deborra before returning back east to found his Hinsdale, New Hampshire studio. It was also where he met many of the influential artists he’s worked with over the years, including Sol LeWitt, Joan Jonas, Wayne Thiebaud, Ed Ruscha, and Elaine DeKooning.

“In the early days I was doing mostly contract printing for other publishers, especially the Limited Editions Club in New York,” Pettengill says. “My very first project here was printing Robert Mapplethorpe photogravures for them.”

Pettengill began publishing independently in the 1990s, producing work that was featured prominently in a 2015 30-year retrospective curated by Boston University, including prints by Xylor Jane, Chuck Webster, and Sebastian Black. Jane, a Greenfield, Massachusetts-based artist whose process he describes as “translating notions of time, meaning and pure mathematics into her own visual language,” is a mainstay with whom he still works with some frequency.

Wingate publishes printed editions of work it creates with both established and emerging artists who are invited to print at the studio. While specializing in intaglio etching, Wingate sometimes works beyond the usual bounds of this process according to the needs of the artist. The artist guides the project; the studio facilitates. The resulting prints are then promoted and marketed by Wingate both to private clients and institutions, including the Whitney, MoMA, and the Library of Congress.

When pressed, Pettengill singles out avant-garde legend John Cage as a favorite collaborator, who he recalls as “one of the most inspiring people I ever met, a very disciplined artist in spite of his famed reliance on chance operations.

“His approach was to imitate nature in her manner of operation,” Pettengill continues. “So he set up systems that would use chance to create strikingly beautiful visual work. He didn’t separate art and life, but continually showed how they were one and the same. His joy and pleasure in the ordinary aspects of life were absolutely contagious.”

Inside wall of Wingate Studios

Wingate is a place where artists can come to focus intently on a particular creative goal, living on the farm or in nearby lodging while immersed in a weeks-long project. The property isn’t impossibly far from New York City, however, so the studio does also attract the odd commuter, like painter Walton Ford, who might be up two days a week to keep a project rolling.

Known for his life-size watercolors of birds and animals in the style of 19th-century natural history painters like Audubon, Ford’s work is, according to Pettengill, “visually stunning and appealing,” but also bears “a large element of the grotesque.”

“His paintings and prints create complex narratives, often based on historical events or people, and function as critiques of the general human enterprise, exploring themes of colonialism, industrialism, the environment, extinct species and crackpot explorers and adventurers. It functions on many different levels, but it invariably draws viewers in before they have a chance to comprehend the breadth of it.”

Despite the somewhat arcane nature of the craft and (by today’s standards) an antiquated pace of distribution, Pettengill believes that print has a bright future thanks to interest from younger generations of artists. His son James and James’ wife Alyssa, who function as studio co-directors, have also brought a more modern edge to the business.

“They keep up with and are connected to today’s emerging artists, and they’ve really pushed Wingate forward in terms of our publishing program,” he says. “We have been working with a lot of younger artists over the last couple of years.”

In fact, he believes the art is flourishing, both through traditional outlets and via workshops affiliated with colleges and universities.

“We’re also in a moment where artists are working across media more than ever, not limiting themselves strictly to a painting practice or even material media. They’re interested in doing their work in many different forms, and, of course, there are so many new technologies that are carrying printmaking into the digital age.”

Peter Pettengill at Wingate Studios

Peter Pettengill, Found Wingate Studios
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Top photo portrait of Peter Pettengill working with his Inking Plate | All photos by Paul Teeling

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