Michael Madore is a naturalist—fascinated by details, taxonomies, and science—but one who can hardly bear to go out into the world.

Michael Madore, KONTAKT!!!, 2016 | ink, pen, watercolor, paper, 19″x25”

His work is filled with nerve bundles, climbing tendrils, meticulously cross-hatched fortresses, densely rendered surfaces of swelling water, floral bursts, crystalline structures, careful lettering, birds, and systems of coils and whorls that link and blanket everything. His pieces are jam-packed, teeming, in a way, but with plenty of space and breathing room.

Seemingly conflicting signals and storylines get balanced out in Madore’s work and life. A bit of both outsider and insider, he has Asperger’s Syndrome. His work has an obsessive aspect to it; his artistic practice, he says, is a means of coping with the overload of distractions and information that bombard us, imposing order on a world that’s always unspooling. With an MFA from Yale, Madore also can talk about his work from a critical-historical perspective and make all kinds of connections to theory.

“It’s almost biological, just the need to make work,” says Madore. “It is my way of coping.”

Madore was born in Hartford, to a French-Canadian family. French—Quebecois French—was his first language. As a kid, he was embarrassed about his background and his mother tongue. The family moved to Maine and Quebec for a time, eventually settling back in Hartford. With an unpleasant home life and undiagnosed mental-health issues, Madore took to drawing schematics, using diagrams from household appliances and other sources as a means of creating coherence. “As a kid I always drew, but very secretly. I drew maps,” he says. “I grew up in a really chaotic household. My father was a really bad alcoholic. We were relatively poor.”

Michael Madore, Misfits 246-358 2016 | ink, pen, watercolor, paper, 19″x25”

Madore got a scholarship to Trinity College. He majored in English and minored in Art History before heading to New York City in 1977, where he worked in bookstores and as a proofreader for a time. With a day job in SoHo, he visited some galleries that featured outsider art and work by the Chicago Imagists, and Madore took an interest in it. “I was attracted because this was not the kind of art history and mainstream narrative that I learned at Trinity and kind of dismissed,” he says. He liked the fact that this was non-New York, non-minimalist art that didn’t have an overt meta-art quality. “It lit a light bulb in me,” says Madore. “I said, You don’t have to do art about art.”

His path to the academy led through the clinic. He moved back to Connecticut, this time to New Haven, in 1983. It was a psychiatrist at Yale—Madore says he’s had “an on-and-off relationship with psychiatry”—who encouraged him to apply to grad school after he was concluding time as a patient there. He got his MFA in painting in 1990.

Madore’s work is more engaged with the natural world, despite the fact that he says going outside is too much for him. He thinks about, reads about, and studies nature, but mostly from books, illustrated guides, movies, and online. “I’m not a nature person,” says Madore. “It’s just overwhelming, the detail. The idea of going into a forest is a nightmare.”

Michael Madore, Asset compromised!, 2016 | ink, pen, watercolor, paper, 19″x25”

Travel, in general, is something Madore avoids. “I’m a horrible traveler,” he says. “I can’t stand arriving or departing.” But his work is a kind of time and space travel. It takes him to remote regions and imagines distant futures, when people and their peculiarities and depredation are maybe no longer a factor.

Madore is working on a series based on Labrador in the future. Labrador is the remote peninsular region in northeastern Canada, with forests and mountains, stretches of exposed bedrock, and plenty of mostly undisturbed wildlife. Envisioning the coming decades, a piece like Labrador 2088 imagines plant and animal species displaced by climate change and man-made environmental flux. “I hesitate to call it a metaphor for global warming, but it is a way for me to project what are some of the changes that will affect boreal forests. Birds begin to migrate, and plants as well,” says Madore. “For me, it’s just a kind of way to pursue my interests in flora and fauna and mutations.”

Michael Madore, Labrador 2088, 2017 | ink, pen, watercolor, paper, 19″x25”

Michael Madore – Artist
Hartford, CT
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Top photo Madore in his studio | All photos courtesy the artist

The post The Insider Outsider appeared first on Take Magazine.

This article originally appeared in our February/March 2016 analog-themed print issue. 

Sitting on the dam at Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks, I took some bread from my backpack and started to eat lunch. Chickadees were gathering all around the iced-over snow, snacking on other skiers’ crumbs, but I knew I couldn’t give my bread up. The flavor of fresh flour—bright as the white snow around me, and lightly nutty—was too good to share.

I had packed a loaf from Wide Awake, a bakery outside of Ithaca, New York, that uses Farmer Ground Flour, stone-ground from organically grown New York State grains. The team behind Farmer Ground Flour is part of an engaging group of farmers, bakers, and other entrepreneurs who are reviving regional grain production in the Northeast.

Vermont, with its DIY, sustainable farming culture extending from the state’s back-to-the-land history, is home to lots of grain revival efforts. Two of my favorites are the Red Hen Baking Company and Elmore Mountain Bread. Both bakeries are starting from the same place: handmade, hearth-baked loaves from grains grown close to home.

Red Hen Baking Company

These loaves reflect the long human investment in grains and leavened bread. Industrialization allowed us to abbreviate the baking process, but bakeries like Red Hen are allowing dough to take all the time it needs to develop flavors and textures. Bread starts at least the day before baking, while loaves made with natural starters take longer still.

Randy George started Red Hen 16 years ago with his wife, Liza. Flour is just one of the ingredients they wanted to source nearby.

“I’m intrigued with where food comes from, as an individual, as a baker, and as a business owner. It makes me feel better if I know what I’m supporting,” says George, a gregarious fellow who often wears a biking cap in the kitchen. He always has a smile, lending the business an air of friendliness and fun. The bakery and café are in Middlesex, just off Interstate 89, but also in the middle of one of Vermont’s beautiful nowheres.

The process of building up a local supply has been an evolution, according to George. He couldn’t just shop from a distributor’s list; he had to help create supply with growers and coordinate with them about farming and milling styles. Red Hen sources 90 percent of its flour from within a 150-mile radius of the bakery. In farm-to-table metrics, that means that about 4 acres of grain a week make their way into 12,000 pounds of bread. For local flour, it’s the lunar landing.

Red Hen Baking Company

That’s because bread wheat has not been grown in the Northeast for almost a century, and farmers are not equipped with the tools, such as combines and grain bins, for the crop. Besides, our humid summers are less than ideal for grains.

Nevertheless, a few Vermont farmers began to grow wheat for bread in the 1970s and 1980s. Red Hen’s first local flour came from Gleason Grains in Bridport. Ben Gleason started stone milling his wheat in 1982. As an interested buyer, George encouraged Gleason to add sifting equipment, which would increase the amount of Gleason’s flour Red Hen could use. George’s next supplier was Aurora Farms, the largest wheat grower in Vermont. Their grain is roller-milled in New York at Champlain Valley Milling. The latest and largest connection has been with a farm in Québec that recently added a small roller mill, Le Moulin des Cèdres. In each instance, the bakery’s feedback has influenced the crop and production.

“What we get is better because of the work we’ve done with our collaborators on variety selection, harvest and nutrient management, and milling,” says George.

Red Hen Baking Company

The collaboration between Red Hen and its suppliers reflects the work of the Northern Grain Growers Association, which began in 2003 with support from the University of Vermont to address the need for organic dairy feed. George has been involved in the group’s baking trials along with bakers from the 225-year-old King Arthur Flour, based in Norwich, Vermont.

Elmore Mountain Bread, located high up a dirt road in the northern Vermont town of Elmore, also put a lot of time back into bread. Owners Blair Marvin and Andrew Heyn make up to 1,500 loaves a week in a room-sized bakery attached to their home. The couple just celebrated their10th-anniversary baking wood-fired, long-fermented loaves. For the last two years, they’ve been using flour they mill themselves.

Marvin, a Vermont native, and Heyn, who grew up outside of Chicago, met while working in restaurants in Seattle. During what they envisioned as a temporary visit with Marvin’s relatives Vermont, the opportunity to buy a house with an attached wood-fired bakery arose. They jumped on it, even though neither had experience baking. They learned their craft by doing.

Elmore Mountain Bread | Photo by Ben Grunrow

About five years ago, when their oven broke, they started experimenting with equipment. “We’ve been innovating things that have been done,” says Heyn, who applied an engineering mindset to designing a new brick oven and, later, a stone mill.

The decision to mill their own flour came from observing their son. One of the only things the toddler ate was baguettes. While Marvin and Heyn were using organic flour in their baguettes, 80 to 90 percent of the flour was white. Taking on the job of milling has allowed them to use more whole-grain flour.

“We’ve been trying to bring back the historical relationship with tools, philosophy, and methods in bread. The decisions we’ve made in the bakery were influenced by trying to get as close as we can to the root of what we are doing,” Marvin says.

“The research I did for the oven was looking at old wood-fired ovens in Germany and France,” says Heyn. “When I was researching milling, I used a book written at the turn of the last century. It had everything that was known about milling.”

Elmore Mountain Bread | Photo by Ben Grunrow

Word of such tinkering travels throughout the collaborative field of bread baking in North America. Lacking a formal apprentice system, bakers rely on each other for practical advice. Often, bakers stay in one another’s towns, observing or working alongside each other to cull ideas for their own systems. Despite its remote location, Elmore Mountain Bread has been a favorite spot to visit. Heyn has also connected with fellow bakers on online forums.

The improvements he made to Elmore Mountain’s oven design have inspired other ovens, and now he is starting a new enterprise to manufacture mills called New American Stone Mills North. The business parallels Heyn’s friend Fulton Forde’s North Carolina-based enterprise, New American Stone Mills. The two companies will work in concert to address the demand for small-scale milling equipment, which is mostly coming from bakers.

Marvin and Feyn are excited to be a part of these new food dialogues, and close to home, as chefs ask them about fresh flour. One topic of conversation is Redeemer, a particularly tasty winter wheat that is the basis of Elmore Mountain’s Vermont Redeemer loaf. It is grown just 25 miles away.

“As people become more aware, [they] are really talking about the fact that the Redeemer is grown at Rogers Farmstead in Berlin,” says Marvin.

I like that kind of talking, because it will lead to more action, and ultimately more wheat, in the Northeast.

Red Hen Baking Company – Randy George and Liza Cain, proprietors
Middlesex, Vermont
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Elmore Mountain Bread – Blair Marvin and Andrew Heyn, proprietors
Wolcott, Vermont
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All photography by Ben Grunrow

The post Bake It Slow appeared first on Take Magazine.