Paul Bowen and his wife moved to southern Vermont a dozen years ago, but he never really left the beaches of Cape Cod behind. That’s because he brought so much from those beaches with him — worn planks, rusty nails and marine detritus he collected after it washed ashore. Those found objects, now stored in a garage and top floor of an historic barn where he lives in Williamsville, Vermont, still serve as the foundation for most of his work.

Whether large-scale wall hangings or smaller, intricate figures, Bowen’s sculpture merges sharp, geometric, abstract shapes with the rustic imperfections of wood shaped by sea and sand. BigTown Gallery is hosting an exhibition of his work at each of its Vermont locations, in Vergennes and Rochester, through December 2nd.

Bowen was born and raised in a seaside town in Wales, United Kingdom, and moved permanently to the United States in 1977 when he was given a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He lived across the street from the water. “I could go to the beach two times a day and collect materials,” he recalls.

He still gathers there every summer, when he returns to teach sculpture classes at the Fine Arts center and the nearby Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. One of his favorite recoveries is the beat-up fishing boxes where fishermen pack their catch on ice. Bowen loves the big but very thin boards, many no more than ¼ to 3/8 of an inch thick. “It’s a very beautiful material,” he says. “It has a kind of honey color from being in seawater.”

Bowen’s collections fall into categories: One is all white-painted wood; another is wood covered in black tar. It’s his version of a painter’s palette. “I don’t throw anything away,” Bowen says. “I need bent nails. I need rusty nails. I even save old staples.”

For years, he has kept a large stash of wood rusted by metal and industrial waste, the remnants of Provincetown’s commercial waterfront, as it sat wedged in the sand. Bowen has hung gallery shows featuring only his rust-stained wood, he says. Now, he’s running low on his stock, so he’s filling buckets of water with rusty nails and wood to get it to pick up the right color.

Life in a quintessential Vermont town, in an old house next to a covered bridge, has provided Bowen with new materials and new fodder. Wood piles up at the foot of the bridge after a big spring snow melt or flooding from major storms.

A series of drawings, several of them in the BigTown show, juxtaposes images of covered bridges onto old maps and other landscapes, even a set of antique greeting cards he found. Bowen uses his own ink, made from a black walnut tree in his yard or from the squid that he catches with his summer students in Provincetown.

The covered bridge is to Vermont what the medieval cathedral is to Wales, Bowen points out. Both are iconic to their surroundings. “It’s just a matter of looking and seeing what’s there,” Bowen says, “and learning from the environment you’re in.”

Paul Bowen–sculptor and artist
Williamsville, Vermont
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Top image: Photo of installation. Photo courtesy of Paul Bowen

The post Unburied Treasures appeared first on Take Magazine.

At age 18, Corrina Thurston was nearly bedridden. She couldn’t sleep more than 20 minutes per night. She had chronic migraines, a severe sore throat, hallucinations, intermittent fever, and infections. A bout of sinusitis caused her eye to bulge. “It was just really weird, horrible things that started happening,” she says.

A freshman studying biology and anthropology at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, Thurston had to withdraw for medical reasons and move back to her parents’ home in Barre, Vermont. It took six years for a doctor to diagnose Lyme disease and a couple of other disorders that Thurston now can trace to the tick that bit her during a hike for her high school biology class in spring 2008.

In 2010, before that diagnosis, Thurston felt helpless. Once an avid athlete who played basketball, tennis, and field hockey, and ran five miles a day, she could no longer even read or watch TV because of the headaches. One day, for reasons she cannot explain, she picked up a No. 2 pencil and started sketching a female nude.

The picture wasn’t bad. And even though she could spend only short bouts of time at it, drawing kept her active. “And it finally gave me something to look forward to the next day,” she says.

Blue-Eyed Kitten, colored pencil, 8×10 inches

Other than the occasional visit to a gallery or museum, Thurston never had much interest in art. She had once seen a colored-pencil drawing and liked the vibrancy of it. So she bought herself a pack of colored pencils and enhanced the nude in purple and orange.

Next, she thought she’d try animals, which she loves. In a magazine, she found a picture of a parrot and drew it. Eventually, she got permission from photographers to recreate their portraits of real wildlife in colored-pencil form.

Hermit Crab, colored pencil, 8×10 inches

Some of her work, which New Moon Café in Burlington recently exhibited, look amazingly photo-like. A bright-green tree frog with striking round red eyes clings to a branch in one drawing. Another captures the dynamic movement of a kingfisher exploding from the water with a fish in its beak, while each white droplet sparkles against the blue backdrop.

“I literally didn’t call myself an artist until, like, three years ago,” Thurston says. “I had come to the conclusion and was O.K. with the fact that my path in life had changed.” Island Arts, a gallery in North Hero, Vermont, features a solo show of Thurston’s work throughout November. She also speaks and wrote a book about how to build a successful art business.

Black Rhino, graphite and colored pencil, 24×32 inches

Thurston recently started a new collection of endangered species—including an elephant and a black rhino—sketched in black against a stark white background. The elephant is drawn face forward, with each detailed crevasse of its trunk visible, as if it’s charging head-on toward the viewer. “Part of the reason I did the white background is their habitats are going away,” says Thurston, who plans to send some proceeds from sales of those pieces to the conservation organization devoted to each particular animal. She also has branched into drawing on furniture. A large green luna moth casts its shadow onto a wooden stool seat, as though it’s hovering over it.

Thurston now takes about 45 medications and tinctures each day to treat her diseases but credits most of her improvement to the psychological boost of drawing. With her animal subjects, the artist can embrace and reclaim the natural world that has caused her so much discomfort.

Corrina Thurston–sketch artist
Barre, Vermont
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Top image: Common loon (cropped), 11×14 inches. All photos courtesy of Corrina Thurston

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Jensen Beach likes to start with a sentence, listen to how it sounds. Then, he writes another one.

The Vermont fiction writer never approaches a story with a big theme, he says, or even a plot. He starts with an image, a character, a place. In his book of short stories, Swallowed by the Cold, each stand on their own, sometimes bright and a bit funny, other times bleak, often reflecting the features of the Swedish landscape where they take place.

Ultimately, the book connects characters who reappear throughout the stories around the recurrence of life’s difficult events—death, car accidents, violence, war and torn relationships—and the ways that people respond and adjust to them. Last month, Beach received the 2017 Vermont Book Award, bestowed by the Vermont College of Fine Arts to an author of an outstanding work of literature, for Swallowed by the Cold.

“It features things that I love,” Beach says of the book, published in 2016 by Graywolf Press. That includes Sweden itself, where he lived for six years, as well as sailboats and the water.

When he’s not writing or teaching writing and literature at Johnson State College, where he is also fiction editor for Green Mountains Review, Beach is skiing or hiking or swimming. In the water, he composes some of his best stuff, he says. “Physical activity is a really important part of my practice,” he says. Beach is not a wake-up-at-6-and-write-for-hours kind of author. Even amid the ruckus of his three kids—ages 12, 9 and 7—he prefers to work at his kitchen table or in his office at the college, where he can read out loud and hear the rhythm of the prose.

Beach, who grew up in northern California, has wanted to write since childhood. He started as an English major at a California community college before heading to Europe, living in Hungary for a time, then landing at Stockholm University. With a plan to become a professor, he started publishing stories in various online literary magazines and anthologies.

Short fiction always was Beach’s favored form. He reveled in “that feeling of breathlessness of just being totally wrecked by a Flannery O’Connor story,” he says of one of his favorites.

Returning to the States for graduate school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, he felt a bit disconnected, he says. He left Europe and became a Californian living in New England. “I think I was a little homesick,” he says. Stories about Stockholm started pouring out of him and ended up as the manuscript for his thesis.

Beach joined the University of Illinois faculty as a lecturer before moving to Johnson State. In 2011, a friend he met at a summer conference introduced Beach to her literary agent. They reworked the stories and shopped them to publishers, placing some in Paris Review, A Public Space and The New Yorker before selling the whole collection to Graywolf.

Beach writes about places after he leaves them, partly out of nostalgia and partly because the distance gives him perspective and inspiration. He’s now tackling his first novel, set in California and Florida, where he has spent some time in Miami. He finds it fascinating to see the contrasts from neighborhood to neighborhood. “It’s a novel about transitions and change and those kinds of personal experiences that we go through,” he says.

Ensconced in the picturesque town of Jericho, close to hiking trails and ski slopes, Beach has no plans now for a Vermont-based story or collection. Maybe at some point, he says, if it shows up in that first sentence.

Jensen Beach–author
Jericho, Vermont
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The post Word by Word appeared first on Take Magazine.

Vermont’s oldest operating covered bridge crosses the Mad River in historic Waitsfield, a perfectly picturesque New England town of charming nineteenth-century clapboard buildings. But beneath that quaint exterior runs a cutting-edge current that has spawned several artistic ventures, creating a quirky clash of old and new.

A haven for skiers who prefer the unadulterated terrain of Sugarbush Resort and member-owned Mad River Glen, the Mad River Valley—with Waitsfield at its core—nurtures locals and transplants who march to the beat of their own drum. That sometimes means places won’t be open when expected or keep inconsistent off-season hours. The bottom line: before you wander to Waitsfield to see something specific, call ahead.

June Anderson equates Waitsfield’s sensibility with the defiant “ski it if you can” motto of Mad River Glen. “In the Mad River, you have to be willing to reach a little farther and work a little harder, but the reward is a little richer and a little sweeter.”

Anderson and her husband, Wendell, own the Bundy Modern, a boxy minimalist structure fronted by floor-to-ceiling windows—distinctly out of place in the sloping terrain—which serves as a contemporary art gallery and their home. It hosts exhibitions mostly in the summer; in the winter, she says, skiers tend to drive up late on Friday, hit the runs all weekend and go home without doing much else.

The Madsonian Museum of Industrial Design contrasts such modernity with a whimsical assembly of old motorcycles, gumball machines, toys, typewriters, telephones (with dials!), and other commercial creations of a former era. In the center of the Waitsfield Village Historic District, it’s open Friday through Sunday and by appointment.

Less dusty and open all year, the Big Picture Theater and Café merges a vintage movie house and tavern with an innovative, locally inspired menu that’s hardly an afterthought to the cinematic fare. Filmgoers can enjoy dishes such as fried chicken, tofu satay, and homemade desserts—including the famous Very Small Donuts— in the theater while they watch.

Back in the historic village, there’s an unexpected oasis of high fashion. 4orty Bridge Boutique features a well-curated collection of clothing and accessories made mostly by U.S. designers, including jewelry handmade by the shop’s owner. It’s one of those sophisticated surprises that pop up in Waitsfield and make it so incongruously appealing.

Illustration by Dylan Fant

The post Take Place: Wacky, Wonderful Waitsfield appeared first on Take Magazine.

In a video that Colin C. Boyd created for a gallery exhibition in Minneapolis this past summer, a bear looks out a small basement window at a squirrel that runs away, seemingly envious of its freedom. The video installation, entitled “The Mechanical Bear and Thunderbird’s Wilderness Dream,” uses stop-motion animation with the live-action presence of the bear sculpture that Boyd built, as well as Boyd himself. Another scene in it shows the animal having a conversation with his creator at a kitchen table.

It’s a sometimes lighthearted, sometimes melancholy view that imagines the animal’s perspective—or reflects the artist’s emotional interpretation of that perspective. Boyd will personify or distort the typical animal image but with a sense of wonder and admiration for the complexity that nature made. “I’m really, really attracted to the form of animals,” Boyd says. “The world of animals is full of the most fascinating things in the world.”

Boyd’s work—whether sculpture, drawings or video—is grounded in natural history, the geological and zoological landscape without human influence. Most importantly, Boyd says, he explores the way we come to understand ourselves and our interaction with the world through these organically formed elements. “It all has to do with the human and the human narrative of our relationship to these animals,” he says.

Colin C. Boyd TBear2017

Boyd grew up in Rome, New York, and took classes at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in nearby Utica. He completed his bachelor of fine arts degree at The College of St. Rose in Albany and then got his master’s at the University at Albany in 2008.

In graduate school, Boyd learned about mastodons that had roamed the Northeast and started fishing for information through museums across New England. He studied reconstructed mastodon skeletons and yearned to know more about the process of doing that work. In 2013, after floating through various art teaching positions in upstate New York, he landed at Middlebury College as an art studio technician. It brought him new terrain to explore—the fossils found from New England’s early development and remnants of the pre-colonial era.

Colin C. Boyd_AIncognitum2008

“The landscape here and the environment are much more conducive to what I’m looking for,” he says. “This whole region is very rich in those early discoveries.”

The bare rock formations of the Green Mountains in central Vermont and the White Mountains in New Hampshire became the focus of his contribution to an exhibition last year called Future Perfect: Picturing the Anthropocene at the University at Albany Museum of Art. He built a science-fiction scene with rock elements as monuments against a sky that changes colors from dusk to dawn. The piece evolved, using video, over time like a work in progress, Boyd says.

Boyd’s work is currently on view at Albany International Airport. “Cormorants and the Whale” depicts the sea birds flying around a reconstructed whale skeleton, intended to capture “just the awe of the size of the creature,” Boyd says.

Colin C. Boyd_Whale2012

For an exhibition scheduled to open in Albany in November, he is building an aluminum “walrus apparatus.” Unlike the bear that interacted with a human and the world outside, the walrus will fit a human inside to control it.

Colin C. Boyd–sculptor and artist
Middlebury, Vermont
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The post Animal Magnetism appeared first on Take Magazine.

If Juston McKinney stayed in New York or Los Angeles to nurture his comedy career, rather than moving back to New Hampshire, he’d have no jokes about New England winters and the futility of keeping a picnic table that gets so little use.

He also might never have developed his bit about how seriously his state takes its “Live Free or Die” motto: “New Hampshire’s got fireworks, no seat belts, no sales tax,” he says, ticking off the list of state freedoms that differ from its New England neighbors. “It’s like Mexico. People come running across the border.” And he wouldn’t have bothered to riff on the Patriots’ multiple Super Bowl titles with his fake public service campaign to help New England families pay for the cost of championship gear.

McKinney performs regularly at the Lebanon Opera House, The Palace Theatre in Manchester, Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord and The Music Hall in Portsmouth, where he does a year-end show that usually sells out. His latest show, titled Parentally Challenged, comes to The Colonial Theatre in Keene on Oct. 21.

McKinney has honed his wide-eyed, seemingly bewildered, often bellowing rendition of life in New Hampshire to significant acclaim. Comedy Central has aired his one-hour and half-hour specials. This summer, he joined a stand-up showcase hosted by Patriots player Rob Gronkowski and taped for Showtime.

Born in Portsmouth, McKinney worked as a sheriff’s deputy in Kittery, Maine, and got the performance bug while doing DARE program anti-drug presentations for kids. In the late 1990s, he secured an agent and booking offers from managers and moved to New York. Later, he shifted to L.A. with his wife, another New Hampshire native who wanted to raise their kids back home.

In big cities, comedians work the clubs night after night, try out and refine material, gather a following and elbow-rub with the likes of Amy Schumer or Louis C.K. “It’s about networking and contacts,” McKinney says. In New Hampshire, “It’s out of sight, out of mind.”

Still, he managed to pick up a charity gig with Schumer this summer after running into her at the revered New York club Carolines on Broadway. His connections with the team behind Kevin James’ movies led to an appearance in Here Comes the Boom.

And while he can’t pop to the next town to get up on a club stage, he finds a way to put in his time. One recent night, he drove to Cambridge, Massachusetts for a 10 p.m. open-mic show to do 10 minutes of new material. “I got back at 1 in the morning, and I gotta get up at 6 with my kids.”

Often, he tests out jokes for the first time during his big New Hampshire theater shows—a risky prospect. Starting small, he’ll build them if they get a good reaction. When they bomb but he knows he has a unique idea, he considers it a worthy challenge to keep working on it. “Those are the gems,” he says.

Juston McKinney–comedian
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
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The post Living Free and Funny appeared first on Take Magazine.

Robin Mix had romantic notions about studying glassblowing from the masters of Murano in Venice, Italy, but they didn’t welcome many American artists back in the 1970s. So he went to Sweden instead, where its own well-entrenched glass craft—less revered and tradition-steeped than in Murano—allowed him to develop his skills. He started shaping molten glass about eight hours a day for a tradesman and then moved to the Orrefors factory.

In his free time, Mix escaped to classes and collaborations with other glassmakers in Amsterdam and Copenhagen. He taught some classes, too, and sold some of his first work. Back the States, he continued his education in Seattle, a U.S. hub of glassblowing. “I was very drawn to the people who were trying to master it,” whose goals were to “try to be the determinant of what happens with glass,” Mix says.

The Murano style inspires Mix, but he has made it his own. It took him years to command the complicated murrini method, he says. Dating back centuries, murrini involves the melding of glass canes in an oven into masses that are cut by cross-section into a sheet. The sheet is rolled up and closed before Mix blows it into shape. The combined canes create an intricate tapestry of colorful squares or bubbles, sculpted into a vase.

Mix’s murrini grew more and more detailed, requiring him to craft his colors from scratch. He needed lighter hues that didn’t end up looking like dark blobs when combined, and the colors changed the metal content in the glass, so he had to continually adjust the heating and cooling. “It’s a very obvious manifestation of physical labor,” he says. “I took it about as far as I could go.”

Mix’s other glass vessels use techniques that turn them striped or plain or into abstract patterns. For years, he sold his work through luxury department store Barneys New York and in galleries around the country.

Ben Fleishman Photography

Mix grew up in Minnesota and stayed in school in the States while his parents and younger siblings moved to West Africa for his father’s work in the foreign service. They returned to settle in central Vermont, near where Mix lives and works in Tunbridge. In 1973, he went to Hampshire College to study architecture and, at nearby University of Massachusetts Amherst, took some glass-blowing classes, which simply looked like fun. “It turns out to be much harder than it looks,” he chuckles.

But compared to architecture, “it was instant gratification,” Mix says. “In glass blowing, you either got something or you don’t.” So he left school early and headed to Sweden.

Recently, Mix created a collection of heavy mixing glasses, wrapped in threads of color, made originally for his daughter, a mixologist who co-owns a cocktail bar in Brooklyn. So many of her friends asked for their own sets that Mix set up an Etsy store to sell them.

Some of his longtime customers have come into his studio to refresh their collections, noticed the new glasses and say, “I gotta have one of those,” he says. That helps this 63-year-old master keep a “youthful enthusiasm” for his old-world work.

Robin Mix–glassblower
Tunbridge, Vermont
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Top image by Ben Fleishman Photography

The post Glassy-Eyed in Vermont appeared first on Take Magazine.

If your idea of an exotic ice cream choice involves chunks of cookie dough embedded in vanilla, then Andrew Burke’s work will really freeze your brain. The co-owner of three Scout & Co. ice cream and coffee cafes in Burlington and Winooski, Vermont, comes up with combinations that few others would dare to marry. He pairs strawberry and lovage in one current selection. Rhubarb and star anise in another. Rocky Rose is an unorthodox twist on the classic: chocolate, marshmallow, and walnuts as expected, but also a strong dose of rose.

Those may sound strange, but they taste inspired. Sweet Potato Frozen Yogurt evokes a cold, tangy version of the same root-vegetable pie popular in the South. Cranberry, Buttermilk & Szechuan Peppercorn balances a light tartness against the rich buttermilk, with just a hint of the Chinese numbing spice that turns the dessert more zesty than peppery.

To develop ideas, Burke looks to the seasonal, local bounty of his surroundings. When strawberries start exploding, he’ll use them in abundance. An early-summer favorite is Strawberry & Hops Sorbet. For spring, his first batch of berries with lovage leaned too green, overpowering the subtle sweetness. He planned to do it again using fresh-strawberry jam to boost the fruit.

In the winter, Burke improvises with readily available currents, beets, or grapefruit. Vanilla Oak, for which he steeps oak chips in milk, is a staple. Most of the year, Scout also serves its signature Smoked Maple & Sea Salt. Burke gets all his milk and cream from the grass-fed cows of Kimball Brook Farm in North Ferrisburgh, Vermont. “When you think of ice cream, you don’t usually think of farm-to-table flavors,” Burke says.

Danielle Rochford, a ministry student and regular at Scout in the Old North End neighborhood of Burlington, reminisced on a recent afternoon about one of her favorites: Blueberry Cheddar Cheese. “I’d never had a cheddar cheese ice cream before,” she says. “I think I came back for some more the next week.”

At first, Burke had trouble blending in the cheese. When he poured it into the hot ice cream base, it turned goopy like Mornay sauce. Adding it after freezing the ice cream caused the cheese to chunk up. Ultimately, he used a blender to get it smooth.

Ice cream innovations involve as much chemistry as creativity. For herbs or vegetables, Burke juices them first, which increases the water content, requiring more cream to offset it. When he works with apples, the fruit bursts its cell walls as it freezes and loses its crunch. “That’s always one of the biggest challenges is to get the texture right with things you wouldn’t normally add to ice cream,” he says.

Burke trained at The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. After kitchen stints in Portland, Oregon, he returned to his native Vermont to work for Misery Loves Company, a bastion of creative cuisine in Winooski. He and colleague Thomas Green left to launch Scout in spring 2014. They wanted a fun, lighthearted way to apply their gastronomic talents and flavor fanaticism without a full-fledged, fine-dining menu. Scout offers brewed and pour-over coffees from four small-batch roasters, including two based in Vermont; doughnuts and pastries from the similarly flavor-twisting Miss Weinerz bakery in Winooski; and Savouré sodas made in Bristol, Vermont, with funky combinations such as apricot and saffron.

Andrew Burke–co-founder
Scout & Co. ice cream
Burlington and Winooski, Vermont
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Top image, Andrew Burke scooping ice cream, photo courtesy of Andrew Burke

The post Here’s the Scoop appeared first on Take Magazine.

Molly Davies doesn’t mind that the era of YouTube and Instagram has turned video production–a medium in which she has made her life’s work–into a mundane practice. Instead she embraces modern technology and appreciates that social media has heightened people’s attentiveness and interest in the act of viewing. “I really like the accessibility of the visual medium to almost everybody,” she says.

The difference, though, between what Davies does as a video artist and the endless Internet uploads of the masses is her devotion to detail and focus. When she walks her dog, she notices—really notices—a bird singing or the leaves in the trees. It’s the view through the videographer’s lens that fascinates, she says.

Otherwise, someone just hits the record button until the battery runs out. “One of the great problems with ubiquitous video-making is it is exactly that, and it is deeply boring,” she laughs.

Davies will lead a video workshop, “Capturing Motion,” from 2 to 5 p.m. July 23 at Cold Hollow Sculpture Park, just outside Enosburg Falls, Vermont. In it, she will invite participants to use their cellphone cameras to shoot video around the park.

Of course, it’s a challenge to make stationary sculpture stimulating. Workshop participants will have to consider framing in a way that intrigues the eye and watch for interruptions in that frame and changes over time, perhaps the movement of clouds overhead, Davies says. “Time is the element of video.” The creativity lies in each person’s interpretation—the set-up and organization of the images. Davies and her video editor, Philip Roy, will examine participants’ work and possibly combine the images into a collaboration.“I’m interested in what people are thinking and feeling and seeing,” she says.

Davies’ work is akin to choreography. She arranges her images like a dance, allowing their interaction with one another to evoke mood and story. A series of videos with two performers weaving through, climbing, pushing against, and moving around ladders becomes riveting to watch. For “Sea Tails,” a multichannel video of underwater kites, she structured the piece in a grid, taking three different elements of video and moving them around.

Molly Davies still of Sea Tails

Davies has collaborated with musicians and artists including composer John Cage, dancer Suzushi Hanayagi and poet Anne Carson. Her work has appeared in art galleries, museums, and festivals around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Venice Film Festival; Musée de l’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival.

Now 73 and living in Stowe, Vermont, Davies had an interest in photography and gravitated toward filmmaking after her first child was born and her father bought her a Super 8 camera to document her daughter’s life. Super 8 involved a finite amount of film and required linear composition of images, forcing Davies to make careful choices in shooting. She still prefers that kind of deliberation and selectivity, even with the more flexible format of digital.
“You choose your frame and the perspective with which you’re going to look at this object or this event,” she says. “You just don’t keep rolling until something happens.”

Molly Davies still from In No Time

She worked her way through 16 millimeter, Regular 8 and Beta technology. Davies now carries a decent but not fancy camera. She has no “technical elitism” or interest in bells and whistles. Art has nothing to do with the tools used, but the “act of seeing,” she says. “In a way, that’s great, because there are not technical barriers to making video, and I think that’s kind of cool, because anybody can do it.”

Molly Davies–video artist
Stowe, Vermont
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Top image: Still from Molly Davies’ video,Tubes. Photo courtesy of Molly Davies.

The post Take a Look appeared first on Take Magazine.

“It’s really fun for me to stand in the audience and hear music I like played by people I like on one of my instruments,” Lea says modestly.

In the 14 years since Creston Electric Instruments sold its first guitar, Lea has developed a cult-like following among strummers of all stripes. The Vermont luthier models his six-string electrics mostly in the post-war Fender style and strives to balance the look, feel and sound of the instrument. “I don’t think I have any superpowers in that regard,” Lea says. “I just really love guitars.”

Lea, a New Hampshire native, moved to Burlington in the mid-’90s and worked on rehab of old houses, eventually doing carpentry and cabinetry. In 2003, he opened a workshop to build cabinets, many for speakers and amplifiers, but started crafting guitars in his garage.

Creston Lea at work

Playing in various bands over the years, he often considered what made one guitar sound or strum better than another. One day, he took out a measuring tape. “I just became totally consumed with every aspect of the guitar,” he says. “I really couldn’t turn my brain off of it.”

He would love a guitar’s tone but maybe wish for a fatter neck. Or he’d like the feel of the instrument in his hands but prefer it sounded a bit brighter. Most guitars, even the best, come off an assembly line. Lea saw the need to customize.

A musician friend had a guitar he wanted to refit with different electronics. That was Lea’s first foray into construction, and it was a success, he says.

That friend—guitarist Mark Spencer, a one-time member of Burlington punk rockers Pinhead and Americana outfit Blood Oranges—showed Lea’s work to fellow players, who started calling for their own Crestons. “His endorsement was enough,” Lea says of Spencer.

Lea has since outfitted Grammy winner Ray LaMontagne; new-wave singer Adam Ant; Ian MacKaye of punk band Fugazi; and Eric Heywood, who has played with The Pretenders and Son Volt. Jay Farrar, front man of Son Volt and formerly Uncle Tupelo, is a Creston fan. So is M.C. Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger, whose band members also own Crestons.

Every instrument is tailored to a client’s specifications, down to the 1,000ths of an inch and the amount of lacquer. (Some players are remarkably particular.) Crestons typically have 12 coats.

A certain kind of wood generally produces a certain tone—though not always, Lea says. Most Crestons are ash, alder, or mahogany, but his specialty is sugar pine, which he salvaged for a cabinetry job in his early days and found to make a nice-sounding guitar.

One of Sarah Ryan’s hand-painted Creston guitars

Vermont artist Sarah Ryan has painted ornate body designs for some Creston buyers. Lea also has made bass guitars, baritones, mandolins, a lap-steel guitar, and a bouzouki (a long-necked mandolin).

In 2014, Creston Electric expanded into an old garage with more space. Above a work bench, guitars hang in various stages of painting, polishing, or curing, which takes several weeks. Lea completes about 60 guitars a year, with a wait time of at least two months.

Creston Lea–guitar maker
Creston Guitars
Burlington, Vermont
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The post Striking the Right Chord appeared first on Take Magazine.