The painter Bunny Harvey, whose show “Fully Involved” is on view at the White River Gallery at BALE in South Royalton, works in two art studios on the property she shares with her husband Frank Muhly in a far-flung corner of Tunbridge.
The more recent studio is an addition that was grafted onto the 18th century farmhouse that they’ve owned since 1977. The first studio, which Harvey built herself, is not far from the house in a barn-like building that overlooks the White River Valley.
It’s an open, airy space with high ceilings. Light floods in. One painting in progress hangs on a wall, and there’s the expected array of paints and brushes. On the door at the entrance Harvey has hung a 19th century painting of a silver-haired man in a waistcoat that she picked up at an auction.
He’s not identified but person or persons unknown (a deranged art critic?) apparently saw fit to shoot at him, leaving behind a few bullet holes that enliven an otherwise wholly conventional portrait.
It may not be coincidence that this direct challenge to the idea of what a painted canvas should look like — i.e., no puncture wounds to remind us just how thin the skin of a canvas really is — hangs in Harvey’s studio.
In her work, Harvey throws down her own challenge to the conventions of how to treat a canvas. A painting doesn’t have to stop at the edges and it doesn’t have to represent one pictorial or temporal reality: it can be many things simultaneously.
Harvey, who is 70, walks to the far end of the studio and, with something of a flourish, throws open the first studio’s large, west-facing doors, revealing a Technicolor, Cinemascope vista of mountains and meadows.
“It’s just my favorite place in the world,” she said.
The view is a kind of living painting that, on a high summer day, thrums with activity, much of it invisible to the human eye. Birds and insects, unseen but heard; humans at work, too, on their tractors, in their cars, planes flying overhead. There are flashes of movement and color in the fields and trees.
It’s those ephemera that Harvey catches in her paintings. Since she was a child, she said, she has had a preternatural awareness of what is going on around her, and has developed her own methodology to describe what she is seeing and sensing.
“I think of myself as a thinker and I make visual things. It’s a language I evolved to get where I needed to be,” she said.
While many of us might, in the view from Harvey’s studio, focus on one or two things, Harvey seems to have the ability to take it all in and reimagine it in her work so that you’re not only seeing what she sees, but hearing what she hears, and tasting, smelling and touching what she tastes, smells and touches.
“My work has subject matter because I think I’m interested in the incredible pleasure of turning thought into paint. I’m interested in how paint grows on a canvas,” Harvey said.
Harvey gets a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional canvas. She lightly paints onto the scenes the outlines of rectangles and squares, as if the viewer could step through these portals into time and space. Fierce slashes of brilliant color — cadmium orange and electric blue — zip across the scenes, perhaps the trails of dragon flies or butterflies and bees.
“I’m just aware of a lot of different sensory output,” Harvey said.
She spends a great deal of time, she said, “thinking about the natural world and our intrusion, and how the natural world is so disorganized by our organization.”
There are 17 works in the White River Gallery show: large canvases, six smaller panels and digital prints of some of her paintings.
One of the big paintings, titled Scented August, depicts a great golden Van Gogh-like swirl of a pasture in the middle ground. In the foreground, Harvey painted tantalizing blackberries that cascade downward; they have such a tangible presence you’re tempted to pick and eat them.
Most of Harvey’s canvases are not strictly representational. They’re recognizably scenes of nature, but they don’t just sit there on the canvas. And they don’t stop at the edges but spill over onto the sides, so that — in this show at least — a connection is made between a painting and the one next to it.
“The interplay between edges is really important; there’s more going on between the edges,” Harvey said.
That philosophy of thinking about the whole canvas, of not reducing the work to a flat plane, is part of what makes Harvey’s work distinctive, said Dian Parker, the director of the White River Gallery.
“She’s able to give a lot of dimension and space, a sense of broad distances and very close up,” said Parker. “The colors are wonderful, and she takes a lot of risks with her paintings which comes from a lifetime of being a painter. There’s a confident feel about her paintings and the large scale with which she paints, and the freedom she displays in the work.”
Harvey was born and grew up in New York City, the daughter of a French mother and American father. Her father died when she was just 2, and her mother remarried. Her mother and stepfather came to Vermont in 1949, buying a summer house in Randolph Center. Harvey has thought of Vermont as home since childhood. She still runs into people who look at her and ask, “Aren’t you that Harvey girl?”
Harvey began making art at a young age. Her bedrooms in both Vermont and New York City became art projects, or mini-museums, as Harvey painted a planetarium on the ceiling, hung mobiles that she’d made and stuck her drawings to the walls.
In Vermont she built forts and collected rocks and in an arts and crafts summer program in Randolph painted abstract work, to the befuddlement of the camp counselors.
When it came time to think about college, Harvey considered such schools as Smith, Bennington and Bard, but in the end decided on the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, from which she received both a BFA and MFA.
“The dean of my high school was horrified that I was going to go to a trade school. I just wanted to be educated, I didn’t know where it would lead me,” Harvey said.
It led her, eventually, to Rome. As a recipient of a prestigious Rome Prize from the American Academy, Harvey spent from 1974 through 1976 working on her painting.
“The American Academy prize in Rome completely changed my potential,” Harvey said. She met there a community of scholars, “a very intense group of people who were really good at what they did. I learned more from that than a Ph.D. program.”
She has returned to the American Academy as a visiting artist numerous times since.
Harvey taught for 40 years at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, commuting from the home she and her husband shared in Providence, although Harvey arranged her schedule to spend as much time in Vermont as possible. They have one son, Nico Muhly, who is a well-known classical composer, arranger and performer living in New York City.
Harvey was honored last year for her contributions to teaching and to the arts at Wellesley with a retrospective of 40 years of her work. She officially retired from the college this year. She has also received an alumni professional achievement award from RISD.
Harvey was dedicated to teaching but she doesn’t miss the administrative duties of academia: “I don’t have to be accountable anymore,” she said.
But she remains accountable, of course, to the demands of her work.
“Can I make that painting say what it’s supposed to say?” she said.
She is also experimenting with the camera on her iPhone, taking photos that pick up the visual patterns around us, whether those are the shadows cast by chairs onto the ground or the fleeting shadows seen through a train window.
It turns out that paint isn’t the only way to get at the physical nature of the world, Harvey said. But whether the photographs go beyond her experimentation is almost beside the point.
“I don’t know if it’s worth anything, and I don’t care,” Harvey said.
The objective is to always be open and receptive to what comes along.
“What goes into my painting is my whole life,” Harvey said.
The Norwich Historical Society exhibits plein air paintings by local artists through July 30. Proceeds from sale of the work goes to the Historical Society. The Historical Society is open Wednesdays and Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to noon. For more information call 802-646-0124 .
Meanwhile, over at the Norwich Public Library, EM Reynolds exhibits a collection of her photographs inspired by literary quotes. “Quotography: Photos by EM Reynolds” is on display until Aug. 30.
“A Moment in Time,” a show of work by area artists, is on view in the Justin Morrill Homestead Carriage Barn in Strafford through July 17. The exhibiting artists are: Gerry Bergstein, Gail Boyajian, Jennifer Brown, Dierdre Dennis, Laura Karetzky, George Lawrence, Anne Leeds, Jo Levasseur, Andy Newman, Jacqueline C. Overstreet, Mary Louise Pierson, Deborah Frankel Reese, Stephanie Reininger and Sandra Williams-Crossley. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday.
Long River Gallery and Gifts in Lyme is taking an unusual route for its current exhibition, which is dedicated to that first and greatest work of art, the human body and the skin that clothes it. “SKIN! (exposed)” includes works by Stephanie Reiniger, Betsy Derrick, Liliana Paradiso, Nils Johnson, Meredith Muse and Doug Masury. The show runs through Sept. 6.
The Betty Grant gallery at the Converse Free Library in Lyme exhibits Japanese nerikomi ceramics made by John Quimby, former chef at the Middlebrook restaurant in Fairlee and the Tip Top Cafe. The show runs until Sept. 30.
Dartmouth College’s Department of Studio Art presents the POD Award exhibition in the Jaffe-Friede and Strauss Galleries in the Hopkins Center through Aug. 21. The exhibiting artists are Noah Joel Smith, Molly McBride and Jordan Craig.
Between the American presidential circus and the clash of outsized political egos and ambitions playing out in Britain post-Brexit, almost no dramatic scenario looks too outlandish or improbable. Director Robert Altman foresaw all of this in his prescient 1988 TV series Tanner ’88, which was written by Doonesbury’s Garry Trudeau. It stars Michael Murphy, one of Altman’s company of strolling players, as a Michigan congressman who decides to run for the presidency. The series was shot on location in New Hampshire, as Tanner enters the New Hampshire Primary.
The Main Street Museum of Art, in White River Junction, is screening Tanner ’88 over three consecutive weeks, starting Friday evening at 6:30 p.m and continuing on July 15 and July 22 at the same time. This Friday’s screening includes a Q&A with Allan F. Nicholls, a friend of Altman’s who appeared in Nashville and has also been a producer, screenwriter and director who has worked with actor Tim Robbins on his films Bob Roberts and Dead Man Walking.
Tanner ’88 is a forerunner of both the British and American versions of House of Cards, and all the other mockumentaries that have come along in the nearly 30 years (yikes!) since it aired. A host of politicians made cameo appearances in Tanner ’88, including Gary Hart, Bob Dole, Ralph Nader and Jesse Jackson. You can also spot a young Cynthia Nixon (later of Sex and the City and numerous stage and screen roles) as Tanner’s daughter.
Donations are accepted at the door.
Arabella, Windsor. The gallery exhibits works by local artists and artisans in a variety of media including jewelry, oils, acrylics, photography, watercolors, pastels and textiles.
ArtisTree Gallery, South Pomfret. “Painting the Air: Landscapes Inspired by our National Parks,” a show of work by artist Joan Hoffman, ends Saturday.
AVA Gallery and Art Center, Lebanon. Artists Brenda Garand, William Haust, Dan Gottsegen, Greg Gorman and Liz Sibley Fletcher show their work through Wednesday.
BigTown Gallery, Rochester, Vt. “Director’s Choice,” a show of work by Varujan Boghosian, Ira Matteson, Helen Matteson, Nicholas Santoro, Hugh Townley, John Udvardy, and Pat dipaula Klein, ends Saturday. “Earthly,” an exhibition of drawings by Marcy Hermansader, is on view through July 16.
Chandler Gallery, Randolph. “Boundaries,” a show featuring the works of numerous New England artists, continues through Sept. 5.
Cider Hill Art Gallery and Gardens, Windsor. Gary Milek exhibits his work in the gallery.
Aidron Duckworth Museum, Meriden. “Color — A Theory in Action,” a show of works by Duckworth, and an exhibition of prints and collages by Philadelphia artist Steven Ford are on view through July 24. The sculpture of Terry Lund, on the grounds, is on view through Oct. 30.
Great Hall, Springfield, Vt. An exhibition of photographs documenting life in Springfield, taken by students participating in the Springfield Photovoice initiative, continues through July.
Hall Art Foundation, Reading, Vt. “Landscapes After Ruskin: Redefining the Sublime,” curated by photographer Joel Sternfeld, continues through Nov. 27.
Howe Library, Hanover. “Paths, Streams and Days of Small Things,” a show of more than 25 pastels and watercolors by Lynda Knisley, runs through July 27.
Kilton Public Library, West Lebanon. An exhibition of landscapes and cityscapes by Lyme painter and illustrator Meg McLean is on view through Sept. 30.
Library Arts Center, Newport. “The Landscape We Call Home” runs through Aug. 26.
Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish. The park is open for the season through October. Standing Lincoln is now on view. “Arrangements,” an exhibit of work by Kirsten Hassenfeld, a 2014 Saint-Gaudens Fellow, is on view in the picture gallery through July 18.
Scavenger Gallery, White River Junction. Artists Ben Peberdy and David Powell bring their version of Hitchcock’s The Birds to the gallery.
SculptureFest, Woodstock. The annual celebration of three-dimensional art is on view at the farm of Charlet and Peter Davenport. This year’s featured sculptors are Judith Wrend and Joseph Chirchirillo. The show remains open for public browsing through foliage. A second piece of the show, curated by Edythe Wright and Jay Mead, opens in September at the nearby King Farm. For more information, go to sculpturefest.org.
Tunbridge Library. “Quartets,” a show by artists Janet Cathey and Kristen Johnson, is on display until Sept. 3.
Two Rivers Printmaking Studio, White River Junction. “Used to Be,” prints and fabrics by Emily Parrish, is up through July.
Zollikofer Gallery, White River Junction. “To Be Determined 2.0,” an exhibition of David Powell’s collages, altered photographs, digital prints and tapestries, is at the gallery in the Hotel Coolidge through July 27.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.