York Corner
In last week's cold rains and raw winds, we were delighted on Friday when circumstances led us unexpectedly out of the storms and into artist Nancy Davison's Bluestocking Studio, in the heart of York Beach.
The timing was excellent, as it happened, because Nancy's annual Miniature Show was opening the very next day, and we had special reason to want to check that out because her advertising for it described it as not only the 16th such show she'd staged, but the "final" one.
It turns out that Nancy has simply decided that, after this summer, she'll close the shop.
And contrary to some rumors we'd picked up, she'll not be leaving York, nor will she be abandoning her many commitments in the area. (She's president of the Barn Gallery in Ogunquit, for example, and active, with her husband, Ralph, in St. George's Episcopal Church in York.)
Indeed, we discovered in a long chat, she's branching out into several other activities, some with ramifications for us all.
But the Bluestocking Studio will be missed.
We started by asking a bit about its history and learned that it's 22 years old this year. Nancy opened it in 1985, at first in the building where Rose's T-Shirt business is now; it's been at its current location, right next to Garfield's, since 1989.
She named it a "studio" deliberately, Nancy said, because she envisioned working in it as well as selling from it, and that's what's happened. A showcase, primarily, for her own works in etchings, linoleum cuts and watercolors, it's also featured the works of other artists, including, until recently, some fine pottery.
The Miniature Show, held always at the very beginning of the summer season, has become something of an institution there. It's featured, as Nancy wrote in her advertising flyer this year, "small works by artists from here and from away," and, as she told us on Friday, has involved, over the years, more than 75 artists, some who've participated just once and some who've participated each year.
When she closes for good, at some time in late September or early October, Nancy promised, "We'll have a party," and then, after that, she mused (since the business has always shut down for the winter) "for a while it won't seem any different."
But more time will then permit her to develop her own website, and to commit to art as well as to those other interests: she's been singing, we learned, and taking piano lessons.
The singing interest, she said, harks back to college days when she was a student at Smith and Ralph was a student at MIT; they met at an MIT choir party where Ralph was tending bar. Nancy now sings as a tenor in the choir at St. George's. The piano lessons, she said, she's been taking for two-and-one-half years, most recently, since January, with Gail Adams, of Kittery, and they include, Nancy stressed, a rewarding attention to structure and theory as well as to mechanics.
Asking about the background that led to all this, we got a whirlwind summary: Nancy was born in Nebraska, attended grade school in Oregon, high school in Iowa and college in Massachusetts; then, following her marriage in Texas, lived in Michigan, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Illinois and New Jersey, prior to settling in York in 1989. (She and Ralph had vacationed here and bought a cottage here first, in 1980.) Behind all those moves were corporate jobs held by, first, her father, then by Ralph, who's an expert in the applications of specialty stainless steels.
Our chat then had us segueing down an unexpected path. She'd done some jazz singing for a while, Nancy said, after having been, as she put it, "a folky in Iowa," who "used to sing with Joan Baez but she didn't know it." Mention of Baez led Nancy to report that she'd heard Baez perform at The Music Hall in Portsmouth shortly after the Iraq invasion, which led, in turn, to Nancy's saying that, in her own work of late, she'd been doing "more political things."
"Political?" we asked.
In answer Nancy cited three works. One, hung in an alcove behind the checkout counter at the shop, looked like an easel-sized multi-leaved tablet. On it, ranged on page after page, were depicted in black-and-white the drawn images of flag-draped coffins as seen from the top. The work is called "Death Toll Rising," Nancy said, and the images represent American service personnel killed in Iraq. The total was 976 when she started the piece in August, 2004, and it was 2,500 when she last updated it; now, she said, she needs to update it once again, to the level of 3,400-plus.
Nancy described another work which. Called "Eight Red Herrings," it shows, she said, eight herrings, red against a gray and white background, the herrings labeled "Abstinence," "Abortion," "Evolution," "Gay Marriage," "School Prayer," "Guns and Flag-burning" and "Anna Nicole;" behind, and looming over all is "Climate Change," linked with "War," "Famine," "Flood" and "Fear."
A third image led to another major revelation. Called "New Orleans Exodus," it showed, in silhouette, gray and shadowy, a line of people, bent over and trudging, single file, some of them shoeless and some in nightgowns, all carrying belongings of one sort or another. Clearly representing the tragic personal impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans residents, it was drawn, Nancy said, from newspaper and magazine photos.
"But," she added, "since then I've been there."
And she told us that she had only just returned, on May 14, from a six-day stay in New Orleans in which Chilton Knudsen, Maine's Episcopal bishop (a woman), led 14 Mainers in a work-session to clean out flood-ravaged houses in a district called Chalmette. Decisions about rehabilitating houses, Nancy explained, cannot be made until they are emptied, stripped to the studs and cleaned; that job, done commercially, can cost a homeowner as much as $8,000. Churches and other non-governmental organizations are pitching in to do it for free.
"It wasn't romantic work at all," Nancy said, complaining about nothing except the fact that, as she put it, "our government has failed us." She and the others in her group wore steel-toed boots and face masks to protect against mold, to wield crowbars in houses that they described as "dark, dirty and toxic." All that they pulled from the houses they piled at the curb for pickup by FEMA - mounds and mounds of rubbish. "I wanted to see it, and I didn't think it would be polite to just go and gawk," Nancy said of the disturbing New Orleans scene, 18 months after the storm.
Space here doesn't permit us to relay all the other images and challenging thoughts Nancy relayed to us from that experience. We encourage you, instead, to meet Nancy and take in the Miniature Show yourself, which continues from Friday of this week through Wednesday of next (May 25-29). The Bluestocking Studio will be open daily on those days from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m.
A little show, we decided, representing no small thing.
