Though duties in his new post are varied, from working with street cleaning crews to organizing restaurant nights, Weidrich’s immediate attention has gone to Art on Lark, the annual day of exhibitions, demonstrations and sales on the sidewalks of the main thoroughfare in Albany’s Center Square that takes place Saturday afternoon.

“Lark Street is the heart of the arts in Albany, and it’s becoming the capital of the arts for the whole Capital Region,” says Weidrich. Citing the recent start of gallery nights in Troy and Schenectady, he adds, “First Friday created a ripple effect that all comes back to Lark Street.”

Much of it also comes back to Weidrich, 34, who’s lived in Albany since 2003 and in Center Square since 2005. He’s a native of Buffalo and holds a bachelor’s of fine arts degree from Syracuse University. To join the BID, he left a position as director of technical services and office manager of the Albany law firm Green and Seifter.

Weidrich’s hiring might be viewed as a new acknowledgment by the Lark Street BID that the arts can be a key to vitality in the region, especially since his two predecessors had backgrounds in real estate management and architecture. But working with the arts community actually dates to the organization’s earliest days.

Art on Lark was the first activity that the Lark Street BID produced after its establishment in 1996. Initially, artists were invited to show art along the avenue every Sunday afternoon for most of the summer. In subsequent years, the plan was retrenched to one Saturday afternoon in early June, with exhibitors dispersed on Lark Street between Washington and Madison avenues.

Although weather is always an unknown factor, registrations have held steady in recent years at about 70 exhibitors, who pay $35 for a 10-foot-square space. Up to 5,000 people are expected to attend this year.

“Art on Lark is my favorite show,” says potter Mary Sanza. “The (other) artists are fun to be with, and the crowds are usually an interesting mix of people. I have a couple of repeat customers, who I enjoy seeing year after year.”

Weidrich says that in addition to the independent exhibitors, this year’s fair will continue some traditions and also include some new offerings.

The People’s Choice exhibit will return for a second year to the Upstate Artists Guild, where viewers of a special exhibit vote with ballots for their favorite pieces of art. Last year, more than 40 artists participated, paying $5 to show up to two pieces each.

New this year will be the closure of two side streets for special activities. On Lancaster Street there will be a chalk art contest. And Hudson Avenue will be the site of “Creative Chaos,” in which artists will demonstrate their working methods, and folks can also try things out themselves, from painting to pottery.

Creative Chaos is presented by eba, the dance and fitness studio that has been a fixture on Hudson just off Lark since 1977. Showing the public how art is made (and not just the finished pieces) was part of the original concept of Art on Lark, says eba founder Maude Baum, who’s also a founding board member of the Lark Street BID. Says Baum, “Sharing in the creative experience of what the artist is doing makes people much more interested in the arts and in pursuing the arts themselves.”

Baum successfully tried out the Creative Chaos idea at last year’s Lark Fest – the annual September event when Lark Street is closed to auto traffic for a full day. It’s the Lark Street BID’s largest production. She says that participatory art-making and an additional stage with more family-friendly entertainers has helped move Lark Fest away from being “a college drinking fair.”

Coordinating First Fridays for the past nine months has allowed Weidrich to arrive at the Lark Street BID with a built-in network of artists, business owners and neighbors. Add to that his other involvements – director of the Romaine Brooks Gallery in the Capital District Gay and Lesbian Community Council building, board member of the Albany Charity for Arts in Education, and contributing writer for Upstate Fashion and Art Magazine – and it doesn’t seem like too much of an exaggeration when he says, “I feel like I know everybody and everybody knows me.”

But thanks to Weidrich’s revealing digital photographs, art gallery goers sometimes also see a rather intimate side of him.

In April, a meeting of Lark Street restaurant owners was held in the UAG gallery. After Weidrich was introduced as the new Lark Street BID director, he rose to speak and quickly realized that a piece of his art – in which he poses nude – was displayed on a nearby wall.

“Everybody was looking back and forth at it and at me,” he recalls with a laugh.

The particular piece, “Tsohanoai” (after the Navajo sun god), was created specifically for UAG’s “Angels and Devils” show and depicts a golden-toned, winged Weidrich against a flaming background. It’s part of an ongoing series of pieces in which original digital photos are fragmented and manipulated into circular patterns, like the effect of a kaleidoscope. Weidrich uses the Hindu term mandala to describe them, and has created about 200 such pieces since 2004.

“At my peak, I could produce a dozen pieces in a week. That’s when I had nothing else to do,” he says. Over the past year, new pieces have been created in the odd late-night hours and mostly for entry in particular shows.

Regarding the nudity, Weidrich says, “I started with some clothing and sort of lost it all along the way.”

Coinciding with Weidrich’s rising prominence in the community, a new and less self-referential direction began to evolve in his art last fall with three pieces created for the “Vacancy” show, a popular annual fundraiser for the Historic Albany Foundation showcasing artistic depictions of empty city buildings. The works maintain the mandala technique but focus on the Wellington Row buildings, across from the State Capitol.

“Michael is pragmatic but also a visionary,” says Jeff Gritsavage, a Center Square resident who is the Lark Street BID’s new president. “The combination of a business sense and artistic creativity is not always the easiest to find, and with Michael we think we have that.”

Weidrich, however, plans to bone up on his fundraising and accounting skills by enrolling in a certificate program in nonprofit management at The College of Saint Rose. He’s already completed a similar post-graduate program at Saint Rose in computer education. Also on his agenda is a greater outreach to the various neighborhood associations that have vested interests in the success of Lark Street.

“I feel a great responsibility to everyone in Center Square,” Weidrich says. “There’s no place like Lark Street. It’s a universe unto itself.”

Originally appeared in the Times Union, June 3, 2007.

Also available in Artists & Activists: Making Culture in New York’s Capital Region.

Like most artists, who almost by definition are individualists, Lohner sometimes wonders where he and his work fit in. A printmaker who’s been on the faculty of the Sage Colleges for 25 years, Lohner creates works on paper that focus almost exclusively on the male form.

“There’s lot of women who make art only about women. It’s a way of studying yourself,” says Lohner. “The prints are about men and me.”

A wide array of recent monoprints by Lohner is on view at Albany Center Galleries in the exhibition, “Translations Lost and Found.”

Most of his works depict faces, though “Atlas,” one of four artist books included in the show, features reclining bodies in the greens and blues of a map. And in the series of prints titled “Column 1″ and “Column 2″ there’s a tangle of male body parts.

Lohner views his current work as speaking of and to men, both gay and straight. “Sometimes men think what is interesting to them is interesting to everyone,” he says. “But men have (their own) body issues and health issues … overlapping issues and affinities.”

There are piles upon piles of men’s faces in Lohner’s “Gate,” a collage of 105 monoprints attached to a wall in an arched shape that suggests a passage or doorway. Most of them have open mouths, suggesting speech or laughter or perhaps even pain. In contrast, the dozen faces in “Coins,” a horizontal succession of circular prints, are more restrained, closemouthed and solemn. Ask Lohner the identity of any individual figure and he’ll give you the same response.

“It’s a portrait of Joe Blow, that’s who it is,” he says. “They’re not real people … just drawings.”

Seldom do the figures have clothing or eyeglasses, because that would suggest a particular time or place. And while many of the faces appear to have African features, Lohner pleads ignorance of their heritage. “It’s more about angle, gestures, shadow, texture, than age or race,” he says. “I want my pieces to be timeless.”

Nevertheless, Lohner doesn’t pull the faces out of the ether. A self-described “pack rat,” he collects reams of photographs from magazines and Web sites and uses them as guides to suggest the anonymous faces that populate his art. Working directly on the plate of a printing press, he draws with his finger in a sock.

“I begin with a putty knife, then a comb, then draw by hand, creating streaks that look like brush strokes,” says Lohner. “(Photographs) are just to have a place to start.”

“In scraping ink off of the plate, Harold makes a really bold mark. … He’s free-handing, not taking a rest, not using a guide, which is unusual,” says Ed Atkeson, an artist and friend, who put on a show of Lohner’s work in 2003 at the now-shuttered Firlefanz Gallery in Albany.

Occasionally, Lohner also lays objects onto the printing plate, thus leaving their impressions on the paper. For example, tools of the carpenter – rulers and T-squares – show up in a series of six prints called “Builders” that are also part of the current exhibit. Confetti, cassette tape and textured linoleum have been used in other pieces.

“It’s a kind of magic you don’t get if you’re not walking out onto the limb,” says Atkeson.

While the daring and experimentation of Lohner’s prints are mostly in the process of creation, there’s an obvious whimsy and playfulness in his other body of work – typefaces.

About eight years ago, Lohner began constructing original fonts, a painstakingly detailed computerized process. Today he has an inventory of several hundred original typefaces that are available at the Web site Harold’s Fonts. They include “Melody Maker,” “Rice Cakes,” “Queer Theory,” “Bride of the Monster” and “Rubaiyat,” to name a few.

“I make more money on fonts than I ever did on art,” says Lohner. “My art is so important, it’s like I squeeze it out of my soul, but strangers send me money for these fonts. It’s like I do crossword puzzles and make money from it.”

In the late 1990s, Lohner took almost four years off from creating and exhibiting art. The Firlefanz show in the spring of 2004 was his first in five years. The self-imposed exile was the result of an accumulation of frustrations with the art scene that will be familiar to most any artist in search of an audience.

“I thought avoiding the (hassles) of trying to get people to pay attention would be good, but not doing the work was depressing,” recalls Lohner. “It made me realize I really do the work for myself. Even if I put it all away. I need to do it.”

Lohner creates in the printmaking studio at the Sage College of Albany where he also teaches. And he likes to spread out, saying, “I’m such a hog, I use every table in the room.” Thus, he works hardest during the school’s winter and spring breaks and the summer vacation, when he can have the entire space to himself. Calling the intensive periods his “retreats,” he says he emerges from them renewed.

“I have a friend who runs marathons. He has no hope of ever winning … but he enjoys it and seems to need to do it,” Lohner says. “It’s the same thing with me and my art – there it is, if someone wants to see it.”

This originally appeared in the Times Union, December 3, 2006.

Also available in Artists & Activists: Making Culture in New York’s Capital Region.

It’s the first rehearsal for act one, scene one of “Sleeping Beauty,” and Basil Twist is telling the frogs how high to hop (and when to “strike,” or leave the stage) and the winged fairies how to glide through the air with grace. A crew of 12 young puppeteers does its best to make the creatures respond.

Twist and his company have come to MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass., for two weeks of work to stage Ottorino Respighi’s 80-minute, three-act puppet opera “La bella dormente nel bosco (Sleeping Beauty in the Woods).”

By late May, when the production premieres in Charleston, S.C., at the Spoleto Festival USA, the stage will be filled with a seemingly effortless beauty. But building a world of fantasy requires dealing with numerous hard realities.

For the preview at MASS MoCA, the piece will still be a work-very-much-in-progress. Not all of the puppets are built yet, let alone costumed. Large chunks of Styrofoam suspended on strings have been filling in as substitutes. And the music will come from a recording. Eventually, the Gotham Chamber Opera will become part of the production, adding seven vocalists, a chorus of 20 and a 34-piece orchestra.

With a budget of nearly half a million dollars, “Sleeping Beauty” is the most ambitious undertaking thus far in the rapid rise of Basil Twist. Five years ago, at age 30, Twist created an underwater abstract treatment – “puppet show” seems hardly the right description – to Berlioz’s “Symphony Fantastique.” It was produced on a budget of $40,000 for a four-week run at Here, a small performance space in New York City’s SoHo district. The piece caused a sensation and played for 18 months. After a national tour, it returned to New York last year for an off-Broadway run of six months.

“Since I did that, the music world opened up to me,” says Twist. “People were excited about how I treated the music.” Since then it’s been one high-profile production after another for Twist, all involving puppets.

His “Petroushka” premiered at Lincoln Center in 2001 and also played at Jacob’s Pillow, as well as five other venues across the country. It caught the attention of conductor Neil Goran, director of the 4-year-old Gotham Chamber Opera.

“I thought it was one of the greatest evenings I’ve ever had in the theater,” says Goran. “It was unbelievably inventive in every possible way, one unexpected moment of genius after another.”

The biography of Basil Twist III says that he’s a third-generation puppeteer. But that implies something a little grander than reality.

“There’s many puppeteers who belong to dynasties. I don’t come from that kind of lineage,” says Twist, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay area.

His mom was a part-time puppeteer who mostly entertained children “very kind of `Sesame Street’-style,” says Twist while his grandfather was a professional musician. “Puppets were a hobby of his and were part of his act sometimes,” Twist says.

Even if Twist doesn’t have the finest of puppetry pedigrees, the art form is certainly in his blood. His affinity for it showed up early on.

“I made all these `Star Wars’ puppets,” he says with a bit of hesitation and a shy toothy grin. Recalling his childhood in the 1970s, Twist says, “I made R2D2 out of L’eggs pantyhose containers.”

Twist arrived in New York City in the late 1980s but soon departed for France, where he spent three years at the International Institute of Puppetry in the rural town of Charleville.

“Charleville ends up being like North Adams,” says Twist, quietly laughing again as he sits in the cafe at MASS MoCA. “(It’s) out in the middle of nowhere, but there is this incredible thing happening there … this mecca for puppetry. People come from all over the world.”

The school’s broad curriculum gave Twist a fluency in the range of international puppetry styles and techniques. Today, when he mixes traditions within one piece, such as putting string puppets and hand puppets on stage at the same time, he’s called avant-garde. But Twist thinks of himself as something of a traditionalist.

“I’m real old-fashioned in that I like the puppeteer to be hidden,” he says. “When I was in France, and in most contemporary puppetry these days, like say `Avenue Q’ (a puppet musical that’s been playing on Broadway for 18 months) the puppeteer is visible on stage. It’s almost the definition of a modern puppet performance. I got so sick of that.”

Although Twist is clearly ready for the challenges of major productions, he still has the most fun making a new puppet in a few hours for an impromptu show. Most often over the years such productions have been in the company of New York City drag queens.

“There are not many puppeteers hanging out in that world,” says Twist, who has performed at many of Manhattan’s gay nightclubs as well as at the famous drag festival Wigstock. He even has immortalized as a puppet the Lady Bunny, Wigstock’s founder and host.

“We would do duets. The real Bunny and the puppet Bunny … the stupidest stuff, but when a puppet does it, people just die,” says Twist.

Becoming an opera director allows for less spontaneity.

“I used to do everything myself,” says Twist, “but once a show gets so big, I can’t possibly build everything myself. It is a struggle for me to let go and have others do the work.”

With “Sleeping Beauty,” Twist is getting plenty of practice at delegating.

“He’s very easy and very silly,” says Jessica Scott, a puppeteer in the current production. She also assists Twist at his studio in Manhattan’s West Village, where work on the current production will continue after the MASS MoCA residency.

“Something that characterizes Basil (is) the way he gets you to commit,” says Scott. “He’s consciously cultivated a community.”

Twist has been building his team ever since “Symphony Fantastique.” As an administrator at Here, Barbara Busackino commissioned that piece and has produced each of his subsequent projects.

“He is extremely controlling, extremely decisive, and he is wonderful because of that,” says Busackino. “If he says there will be a dance of 12 rose nymphs, there will be a dance of 12 rose nymphs in the end. … You can get a team behind that and realize it. Of course there’s tons of experimentation and failures along the way.”

It’s not just other puppeteers who are getting behind Twist’s vision. Prestigious institutions also continue to seek him out. Lincoln Center has recently come on board for “Sleeping Beauty” and will present the production at its annual summer festival this year.

In the meantime, Twist is keeping busy creating more stage magic.

“I’m into spiders. That’s part of what sold me on this show,” he says. “I saw spiders (in the story) and was like, `Great!’”

Originally appeared in the Times Union, February 13, 2005.

Also available in Artists & Activists: Making Culture in New York’s Capital Region.

Albany artist Kevin Bruce is describing his feelings when in the midst of creating.

“You can spend a whole day painting and not eat and suddenly feel really faint and nauseous and dizzy and sick,” he says. “And you’ll still be like `Oh, I have to work on this more.’ And then you’ll force yourself to go and take care of your body. You really are just getting nutty. That’s how it’s always been with every painting I’ve ever done.”

The need to create might be a common denominator to the more than 70 artists who, like Bruce, will be exhibiting their work at Saturday’s Art on Lark. But if his work habits are typical of the artistic mentality, Bruce’s subject matter is unique – at least in Albany.

Through paintings, drawings and comic books, Bruce depicts what he knows well – mostly drag queens and other slices of gay life. More than an observer, Bruce is himself part of the local drag scene. His persona, named Patti Kettleton, is as colorful and fantastic as his visual art.

“His drag is art as well,” says a fellow Albany drag performer who wishes to be known only by his drag name, Frieda Munchon. “Once you see him talk or perform you realize there’s something there under all the paint.”

“I made a decision before I moved here that I wanted to pursue art at any cost,” says Bruce, 38, who came to Albany in 1998 after a year in Waterbury, Conn.

After being here about a year, Bruce began curating art shows in the modest gallery on the top floor of the Capital District Gay and Lesbian Community Council. It became his passageway into the local community, as well as into a new creative pursuit.

During his two-year tenure, each show was an opportunity to help other emerging artists, and each opening a platform for his emerging drag persona.

“That’s how I started doing drag, at the openings,” says Bruce. He recalls saying to himself, “I’m going to wear makeup and crazy hats, ’cause I’m the curator. … I’ll dress up for all the openings, and they’ll know I’m important cause I’m nutty-looking.”

It didn’t take long for Bruce to become part of the more traditional drag scene, which is centered at Albany bars like The Phoenix and Fuze Box. But he’s always looking for new and unexpected venues for his friendly style of performance.

About a year ago, for example, he led a monthly bingo night at the now defunct Mama Rosa’s Pasta Cafe on Albany’s Lark Street. But rather than call it “Bitch Bingom: as such events are known in New York City, he gave it the name “Queenie Bingo.” “People won’t want to eat there if there’s some evil drag queen cutting them to ribbons,” says Bruce.

Coming up with fresh outfits for Patti sometimes interferes with time for Bruce’s painting. But both pursuits emerge from the same source – the need to create.

“He can take a burlap bag and make it artistic and beautiful,” says Munchon, whose own getups benefit from Bruce’s imagination. “He made a dress out of Altoids ads, and it was amazing.”

Drag may be a world of fantasy and play, but in the mind of Kevin Bruce and the character of Patti Kettleton it is also an art of expansion and possibility.

“You can turn an event from everyone socializing and being quiet into people being willing to let their wilder side come out, because somebody (else) already did,” says Bruce. “I’ve taken the first step for them. Nobody is worried about being the biggest fool anymore – because I’m here!”

Big hair, ruby-red lips, black leather, rippling muscles and oversized angel wings populate Bruce’s paintings. His elongated forms are backed by brick walls, cyclone fences or abandoned docks: a potent mixture of dream figures and urban reality.

Bruce is well schooled in fantasy art. His former mentor is the widely known graphic artist Greg Hildebrandt, who is best known for the original “Star Wars” poster from the 1970s and a popular series of “Lord of the Rings” calendars published during the 1980s.

In the late 1980s, Bruce studied at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in Dover, N.J., where Hildebrandt was a faculty member. But Bruce actually came to know the older artist through Hildebrandt’s two daughters, Mary and Laura, who also were studying at the school. Bruce became a regular presence at the Hildebrandt household.

“His daughters would never get up until noon, so I had all these hours to discuss art with Greg, and we’d pore over art books,” says Bruce. “And he said (for example) `I suggest you look at Botticelli … to learn how to draw elegant hands.’ He (also) introduced me to art of Paul Cadmus, who’s one of my real heroes.” Cadmus, who died in 1999 at age 94, was known for his virtuosic figurative style and often homoerotic subject matter.

When Bruce was living in Waterbury about eight years later, he developed another student-teacher relationship with the late painter Jules Moison. Where Hildebrandt taught craft and professionalism, Moison passed on something more personal.

“He didn’t do the whole art-theory thing so much,” says Bruce. “His was more about what I could bring to art spiritually as a gay man.”

In Albany’s ever-changing grass-roots art scene, Bruce has become an old-timer.

“I’ve never been to an art opening where I’ve not seen him,” says painter and photographer Shaina Marron, who has made Patti Kettleton a subject of some of her own works. “He’s been around a long time and seen the changes … and the galleries that come and go.”

And the traditionalist leanings of Bruce’s painting style are not lost on his colleagues.

“Kevin is actually quite classical and does a great deal with highlighting and painstaking detail to make his paintings vibrant,” says Albany artist Stephen Mead. The two met several years ago when Mead’s work appeared in one of Bruce’s shows at the gay and lesbian center.

Most any weeknight, Bruce can be found in the center’s little coffee bar, or out on Lark Street chatting with friends. “I know everybody,” he says.

But not everybody may recognize him if they’ve only met the flamboyant Patti. On a normal day, he embodies an entirely different archetype — the nerd.

Large dusty glasses, drab T-shirts and slouchy jeans adorn a slight frame and pronounced belly: a sharp contrast to the colorful and shapely figures of Bruce’s painting. Yet his sparkling eyes and easy, hearty laughter, as well as the friends that often surround him, suggest there’s more beneath the surface.

“Kevin is a free spirit,” says Munchon. “He’s crazy, but that’s good. His outlook is different than anybody else’s.”

Bruce is also admired for his generosity. He regularly donates paintings to benefit auctions – seven sold at last fall’s “Art for AIDS” – and an illustration of his is on the cover of this year’s “Pride Guide” program for this month’s gay-pride events.

“Beyond his unique performance flair and sense of humor is a deeply serious and thoughtful man committed both to his art and to the betterment of his community,” says Mead.

Originally appeared in the Times Union, June 4, 2004.

Also appears in Artists & Activists: Making Culture in New York’s Capital Region.

In 1971, artists Robert Nunnelley and Gerald Coble bought an 18th-century house to serve as their country home and studio. Since then, the two men – now in their 70s and a couple for more than four decades – have slowly made the town into their personal arts colony.

First, they restored their four-bedroom house to its original simplicity by removing layers of wallpaper, dropped ceilings and linoleum floors. They filled the rooms with period furniture and choice works of art — mostly their own. Then came the gardens, the clearing of trees to allow a view of the river, and the planting of new pines to serve as a shield from the road. As the years have gone by, they also acquired several smaller neighboring houses, which have been put to use as painting studios or rental properties.

They hardly act like land barons. Retired from active careers, they are quiet gentlemen who spend the days tending their gardens, caring for their Siamese cat, and producing deeply personal works of art that regularly draw collectors and other artists to sleepy little Battenville.

Nunnelley’s colorful canvases are exuberant, but the artist himself is the opposite of effusive: His wrinkled face and brilliant blue eyes light up when he’s asked about art, but he doesn’t volunteer much. Coble is the more talkative of the pair, although his own art is more wistful, almost somber.

“I liked what they did from the word go,” said Solange Herter, an art dealer who has lived directly across the river from the two artists for decades. “Yet, I’ve never seen anything in their work that in the remotest way shows that they even know each other.”

Like Coble, Nunnelley came from the South. A native of Birmingham, Ala., he moved to New York City in 1957 as a protege of the sculptor David Smith. Nunnelley studied with Robert Motherwell and was associated with other greats of the abstract expressionist movement, including William De Kooning and Franz Kline.

“I came to be with that group, but late,” Nunnelley says.

Settling in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, he became a professor of fine arts at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, N.J., in the mid-’60s; he retired in 1996. While his teaching career remained stable, his art took some turns.

“Abstraction was emotionally demanding,” he says. “It’s a kind of involvement where you don’t know what you’re doing, and yet you have to structure it.”

“It was very unsettling because it took a long time to find another tradition to belong to,” he says. Eventually, Nunnelley found inspiration in the work of Matisse. His recent works share the French artist’s vivid sense of color and bold lines, but there remain hints of his roots in abstraction.

Although he mostly paints still life compositions, his canvases are large – four feet by six feet, or bigger. The pieces are worked out in advance in a black-and-white calligraphic style (reminiscent of Smith, his initial mentor). Nunnelley frequently spends years on a canvas, returning again and again to get light and shadow just right.

After working in a variety of studios around the property, Nunnelley seems particularly happy with his current space, which occupies the entire second floor of a historic barn that was converted into a tavern a century ago. After eyeing the property for years, he and Coble bought it in 2000.

A self-taught artist, Coble was living in his native North Carolina when he met Nunnelley, who was visiting friends there in the early 1960s. Within a year, Coble relocated to New York. When they bought the Battenville house, he began staying in the country while Nunnelley spent part of each week teaching in New Jersey.

“Collage construction” is the term Coble uses to describe his work. Within a large white field surrounded by a simple frame, he places seemingly random objects – broken crucifixes, old postcards and magazine clippings, antique clothing. Although the works are sparse, they are also highly evocative.

Coble often works on a theme inspired by the life and work of artists as diverse as Walt Whitman, Marcel Proust and Ava Gardner. The materials have been gathered, he says, “over a lifetime of obsessions.”

His work is sometimes compared to that of the American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell, but Coble cites no influences other than the Italian countryside, where the couple has often vacationed.

It was, in fact, the way the unspoiled countryside and gentle hills of Washington Country reminded them of Italy that drew them to the area. Not surprisingly, Coble’s studio at the back of the main house looks out on the river.

Although their dining room table can seat 12, Coble and Nunnelley are typically modest about their social life, as well as their prominence as artists. It’s a viewpoint that seems to fit with the simplicity of their lives, and the focused clarity of their art.

“The older one gets,” says Coble, “the more one seeks to get to the essential and to remove clutter.”

This story originally appeared in the Times Union, July 4, 2003.

Also available in Artists & Activists: Making Culture in New York’s Capital Region.