In 1993, when he was 5 years old, Ben Fisk took a field trip to a sugarhouse with his Temple, New Hampshire, preschool class. It’s not hard to imagine the excitement of these little kids, taking their first deep dive into the alchemy that winds up as a delicious puddle on pancakes. And it’s easy to conjure their delight in coming in from the cold and being enveloped in clouds of moist, fragrant steam. To picture the sticky fun of sampling different grades, from light to dark; the magic of sugar on snow; the sugar high that followed. Maybe they got to take samples home. Maybe they thought a little harder about what they were pouring onto their pancakes the next time.

What’s less predictable is obsession. Passion. Because at the age of 5, Ben Fisk could not stop talking about syrup. He’s a fifth-generation maple maker, so it was only natural that his dad knew how to make it and his grandparents had the tools to get him started. “We borrowed 13 sap buckets from my grandfather and asked the neighbor if we could tap their trees,” he says. That year he produced less than a gallon, but he admits he talked about it “nonstop.” For a Christmas present, his parents bought him an evaporator. Now he was 6.

Fisk’s genial bearded face, outdoorsy demeanor, and ready laugh belie the seeds of intensity and focus that were surely there even three decades ago. When he thinks back on what hooked him about sugaring, he confesses, “I was so young, I don’t remember all of it, but it was probably the process.” Then he grins. “It’s an open flame! You’re getting to play with fire! The sap is coming out of trees! It was all interesting to me.”

Back then, everyone in the area knew about the whiz kid from Temple, the eventual owner and founder of Ben’s Sugar Shack. After that first year, he tapped 200 more trees, and then kept adding. In the summer, he sold lemonade and maple syrup outside the Temple Store, in the center of this small, historic town. His dad built a sugarhouse that still sits on the family property. Someone had to drive him around to collect the sap, until he was old enough to get his own license. And still he kept adding trees. You’d read about him in the local papers, charting his growth by taps and awards, rather than years. When he was 15, he won the coveted Carlisle award from the New Hampshire Maple Producers Association for the best maple syrup in the state—and was the youngest ever to win.

He hit the big time when he launched his first website in 2003 and the Associated Press got wind of it. “They wrote this great article, everyone published it, and our website blew up,” Fisk remembers gleefully. “I had to take a few days off from school to fill the orders that came pouring in.” Which is funny, because he’d always told his teachers he was going to sell maple syrup for a living.

I should mention that right now it’s mid-February, and we are standing in the Maple Station Market, a handsome building on Route 101 in Temple that opened in December 2023. It houses Fisk’s sugaring operation, Ben’s Sugar Shack, along with a bustling country store and deli that keeps the maple theme front and center. He bought the original 15-acre property when he was in his mid-20s, but then it took years to get to this point.

Fisk boiled this morning and made 330 gallons of syrup; he’ll boil again later this afternoon and probably make another 330 gallons. He’s got sugarbushes scattered over five different towns, over 28,000 taps, all within an hour’s drive; blue tubing snakes through the surrounding woods like rugged spider webs, delivering precious drops to collection tanks. There are five guys working the woods in November, checking the lines and doing maintenance, and they start tapping the day after Christmas. It is literally his dream come true.

The waxing light of February feels like a New England miracle when it finally comes. By March, it’s incontrovertible, a fact. There are no dog days of winter, but if there were, they might be now, when we’re crawling toward spring. It’s all about the light, and change, and sap is a gravity-defying proof of this metamorphosis. Syrup feels like boiled light. We may be able to explain it scientifically, but it’s still one of earth’s happy mysteries. Why does it taste so good?

In the end, Fisk tells me, it’s about weather. If the 10-day forecast stays like this for the rest of the month, it will be a terrible season, he says. You have to have nights below freezing and days around 40 to 50 degrees. If all goes well, it’ll take 40 to 60 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup—that’s according to the signs handily posted along Fisk’s popular maple tours. A tree can produce more than a gallon of sap a day, there’s another tidbit. Ben Fisk knows as much as anyone about this ebb and flow.

He tells me he’s excited every day when he gets up. Sure, maple syrup may be the stuff of kids’ dreams, but it’s more than that, too. In the end, for him, it’s about being out in the woods. “You’re out there by yourself listening to the birds and the trees, looking at different things. The earth always grows in different ways. And you’re trying to figure out how to bring the sap out of the tree, this tiny drop of maple sap.”

It’s a unique job, he admits. The tree produces this one drop. And then Ben Fisk brings it home. bensmaplesyrup.com

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The house stands alone, in the center of a clearing: a simple white structure with dark window eyes, open to the sunny glade. Behind, a mossy rock face, several feet high, creates nature’s own version of a stone wall, and the woods fan out for miles. The steep roof rises like prayer hands. Birdsong drops all around.

“I had this vision for so long about how I wanted this house to look,” says Britt Witt. “All the white, very reminiscent of the white steepled churches all over Vermont. We thought about it for what felt like years.”

The last time I saw Britt and her husband, Matt, was seven years ago, when they were ensconced in an expansive brick studio in Burlington, Vermont, making ruggedly beautiful waxed canvas bags under the name Red House. Since then, the former Arizonans have weathered Covid; cleared the land they bought in 2016 on this precipitous ridge in Weybridge, Vermont; built their elegant, spare home on 23 acres; and finally moved in full-time, in 2022. They’ve also (just) sold their namesake “Red House,” in Shelburne, where they raised their kids, half an hour north of here.

“This is the Vermont we longed for when we moved here,” says Matt. “We were always looking and pricing, but it was insanely expensive—totally out of our grasp. So we ended up in a little house in Shelburne Village, which worked out great, with the kids walking across the street to the school.”

When they expanded their search beyond Chittenden County, this was the first property they looked at: affordable, nothing but dense woods, with a treacherous driveway winding skyward, and a sharp, lunging turn they dubbed Dead Man’s Curve near the top. They eventually bought three of the five lots, and “dreamt on it, for four years,” says Matt. “We would come up here and have little gatherings with friends and set tables in the middle of the woods.” Britt points past the double glass doors, leading from the kitchen. “We homed in on that mossy rock wall. It was like Lord of the Rings, like Shire country.”

With a tight budget, they began talking to builders, getting quotes. “We drew this building on a piece of computer paper,” says Britt. “There was no architect. We had this vision of what we wanted. Then Matt called me one day, and he’s like, ‘Britt, I don’t think it’s going to work.’ The quotes weren’t in our budget, or if they were, they didn’t include electrical. Or a roof.”

And then, they found their guy; met him in Middlebury, over bagels and coffee. “We were sitting there,” Britt remembers, “and I asked, ‘So is the roof included?’ Yes, it’s turnkey. ‘Can we do marble counters?’ Yeah, no problem. ‘Cabinets?’ Turnkey. ‘Toilet?’ Yes, guys, it’s turnkey. And it’s like, yes, yes, yes.”

Their budget helped keep the design simple. Two or three interior walls. No closets. “It keeps you honest in what you possess,” Matt says. “Everything has to have a place or a function. If it doesn’t, it’s not necessary.”

For inspiration, they drove around, literally. “Britt wanted to create this great room to mirror all of the churches we were driving by. Three to four windows on each side, big double doors. And she’s like—let’s make our church out in the woods.”

So how exactly did they design a great room? They found houses that inspired them. They had to learn what a pitch was. “We just picked one and held our breath,” Britt laughs. “We had no idea what we were doing. But that’s never stopped us before.” The ceilings are nine feet high in the kitchen; 22 to the peak in the living room. They settled on six lights for the Marvin casement windows, but agonized over whether it should be 12. Or two. They studied other people’s windows, roof pitches. And hand-flagged the boundary of their future home in the woods, tracking the sun, figuring out where the front of the house would go.

They broke ground on June 1, 2019. The house was “done” by November. Hundreds of details were decided in those months. And that, they emphasize, is the crux of everything.

“We decided to be really intentional with the fixtures, with the finishes, with the trim and the molding, and the doors we picked out. To take this simple space and just give it an energy that almost doesn’t belong,” Matt recalls.

“It’s the details that make all the difference,” Britt says. But nothing was more important than the gooseneck sink fixture, its brass now aged, sitting proudly at the center of the kitchen island. It was the first thing the couple bought, before they even broke ground. The whole house is built around it.

Britt’s dad lives in England, and that’s where she first learned about DeVOL Kitchens, makers of gorgeous bespoke kitchens. The bathroom lights are also from DeVOL, but it’s this specific DeVOL faucet that sets the entire tone for a simple, elegant workspace, with a decidedly Shaker feel.

The kitchen floor is just as intentional. “I wanted something that looked like you brought in stones from outside, and that’s your floor,” Britt says. “Old, old English. I found a piece of quartzite, and knew this was it. When you’re building new, you need to have character. That’s why we did unlacquered brass on the kitchen faucet. The marble countertop gets a patina, too, and with the floor sometimes pieces chip off.”

Matt sees a connection to their Red House waxed canvas bags. “They age, too. A handbag that’s five years old looks totally different from when it was new. All this stuff as well. That was a shiny faucet; now it has character on it.”

Other details? The bathtub taps on a sprawling tub are from Waterworks, inspired by the Marlton Hotel in New York City, where they once stayed. And someday there will be an indoor shower, but meantime Matt has installed and hardscaped an outdoor hot/cold shower. “Shower season” runs May to November.

“It’s exactly what we wanted when we first came here,” Matt says softly, looking around the glowing space. It’s easy to imagine the seasons moving past these windows in a kaleidoscope of colors and images. Deer and birds. Foliage and snow. Light and more light.

They’ve planted fruit trees and blueberry bushes, built raised garden boxes. “We want to stand in the old ways,” says Matt. Then he grins. “We’re going backward. We’re not going into the future, into the meta. We’re standing in the old ways. Our end goal—we jokingly say—is that we want our whole life to become projects and chores, all the time.”

Last winter, Britt says, she gave up artificial light at night. “We had candles and oil lamps all winter.” Matt muses, finishing the thought: “It’s like we have 150-year-old people inside of us, trying to get out.” 

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The hobbit house burrows into a hillock in Morrisville, Vermont. Its round door is edged with a remarkable fringe of dark stone, the opening just tall enough to accommodate its creator, Thea Alvin, making it roughly 5 feet, 2 inches. Inside, the tiny domed space—the fruits of her workshop on how to build a root cellar—tunnels into the belly of the land. But this is not a story about height, or hobbits, or even strength, although for the record, this dark-haired, warmly funny stonemason artist can squat 460 pounds, she tells me without a hint of braggadocio.

This is a story about hands. What they can create, and how, and sometimes their ability to move literal mountains to make things of beauty. “My hands are so smart,” says Alvin. “They know what to do. They do it without me needing to direct them, spontaneously and independently. They do things I don’t have to anticipate or plan for.”

What they do is lift stone and place it in unlikely ways.

The Phoenix Helix spirals across Alvin’s front yard, a 100-foot-long-and-growing stony haven for chipmunks and the place where local teens come to have their yearbook photos taken. The continuous loops are like stone cartwheels, gravity-defying, awe-inspiring. The eye-catching helix follows the contours of Route 100, a roadway that is busy by Vermont standards—we are, after all, just nine miles from the slopes of Stowe. Which means that the casual Sunday driver, random visiting tourists, a New York Times reporter, and even Oprah’s people might be inclined to stop and explore Alvin’s sculpture park. Because she does call it a park, and there’s certainly much more to it: undulating walls that rise into Gothic arches or settle into circles; ponds edged in giant stone; a waterfall; a pizza oven modeled after the beehive-shaped trulli in southern Italy, where Alvin brings students to help repair those crumbing little structures. The soundtrack is provided by roosters and chickens, shaggy Angora goats, happy dogs, wind. “People stop on the side of the road all the time,” she says. “They tap on the door. Sometimes”—she pauses—“they come right into the house.”

The helix also tells a story with parallels to Alvin’s own life. It is a celebration of gravitas and astonishment, turns and spirals, explosions and joys. It is also tied to this wildly beautiful patch of land and its companionable buildings: an 1810 farmhouse, a wood-clad barn, a hobbit hole, a goat shed. She sometimes wonders whether the place is a vortex of energy, when she looks at her life, events, people, the creativity that seems to settle and swirl here.

“I grew up on Martha’s Vineyard,” she tells me, “and I ran away with a boy when I was 18. I married him, and we bought a camp in Wolcott, Vermont, and raised our kids out there in the wild. For 12 years we lived without running water, or electricity, and it was a hard, hard path.” But she credits that path with teaching her to work by “feel.”

“I lived for such a long time without electricity, so working in the dark has always been part of my way of doing things. What would it be like if I couldn’t see the stones? How would I manage them? Training my hands to see without my eyes has been a very important part of what I do.”

How to Make an Arch

Alvin learned the basics of stonecraft as a teenager, during the family’s yearly bouts of financial feast or famine, when her father would take on masonry jobs to pay the bills. Alvin, 16, was his helper. Later, she would build on that foundation, apprenticing with a stonemason in Stowe, and then taking on stone jobs for trade in Europe, with an organization called WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms), gathering the skills that would ultimately pour into the massive sculptures, labyrinths, and stone “clocks” she is known for today.

When Alvin moved here 24 years ago, her stonework at the farm came alive almost from the start. She remembers sitting at the picnic table and crying, because “there was something about being able to buy this house. Some connection between me and the land. It feels like a sanctuary that allows me to express myself. An unconditional place where I can think out loud with my hands.”

We walk up a set of mossy stone stairs, past the hobbit door. “When I first came here, I wanted to make a sculpture on the highest ground,” she tells me. She points to a spot where old apple trees bend over a stone circle that looks out over the land like a benevolent eye. There’s a lot to take in, the cumulative work of decades: an apple orchard, a small vineyard of Maréchal Foch grapes, the blueberry patch, espaliered pear trees, beehives. There’s Aurora Pond, part of which Alvin built using an excavator. She topped it off with a waterfall tall enough to walk under, during that first year of Covid. “It was meant to be water security,” she says. “But look at that crop of tadpoles! It’s really frog security!”

Up here, surrounded by her handiwork, she explains how she taught herself to make an arch, because “anyone can study arch building, but I wanted to figure it out.” She began by stacking two columns of marble, wrapping her arms and legs around them, and guiding them together. The piles collapsed. But by summer’s end, Alvin had evolved a wooden arch to support the stones, and a system of wedges. That was the easy bit. “The challenging part is determining how big, and what shape, and how it looks—that’s where the art is.”

The tools of Alvin’s trade haven’t changed much since medieval days: a mason’s hammer (“brickie”) with a chisel on one end and a hammer on the other. “I don’t do a lot of what’s called ‘dressing’ the stone,” she says. “I don’t hammer it into submission. I like the rocks to have their natural edges. I don’t mind that a rock is rusty. The imperfection makes it feel comfortable, and it lets us explore it and accept ourselves with our own imperfections.”

All of her hammers have names, but her favorite is Karl, handmade in Barre, Vermont, a gift from a friend. And they’re spray-painted (a decidedly un-medieval touch), because “when they’re hot pink, they don’t get lost in the grass.” She tromps everywhere in her Crocs—footwear firmly planted in our times—so much so, that her feet are dotted with tan marks. Even so, as I relearn the differences between Gothic and Roman arches, it’s a little like time-traveling into the world of a medieval craftsperson.

“It would be pretty easy to look at me,” Alvin observes, “and make a judgment that would be 100 percent inaccurate. Unless someone looked at my hands, they would not guess what my capacity or skill set is.” She gives a quick smile. “And I really like that. I like that as a lesson for myself to not judge other people.” Her hands are rough and capable. Years of working with abrasive stone materials have worn her fingerprints off. But beyond that, her hands are never still.

As we wander, Alvin waters the goats, relocates a chicken, picks bugs off a vine, and gathers a few twigs to add to the “death tunnel,” woven from fallen tree branches, where she has buried her animals over the years: dogs and cats, chickens, goats, and pigs. These hands, she informs me, also do many other things. “I’ve been a tailor, a knitter, nursed quite a few sick animals. I’m a writer, I’ve done massage work, I prepare a lot of food. I tap trees, I make maple syrup in the spring, I paint, I plaster, I lay tile and brick. I can do any of the building things, and I know how to use all of the silverware on a fancy dining table.”

The rooster is absolutely screeching. Circling back, we pass by arching wooden forms, sunk in tall grasses behind the barn, waiting to shoulder their next load. “We’re kind of growing up together, too,” she tells me of this place. “And I’ve wanted, since the fire, to fix her and make her whole and beautiful.”

Fire on the Farm

The fire began at 3 a.m. on a December morning in 2017. It raged through the barn and studio, then jumped to the house, taking half of it. It killed goats and chickens, destroyed artwork, and left Alvin with such a heightened sense of hearing that she still wakes up at the slightest sound in the night. And then, not long after, she had to leave for southern Italy, to lead a workshop to help rebuild the trulli, in Puglia. “I feel like I have the most amazing luck and the worst luck,” she admits. “I feel super-lucky, but also like I’m a person with the widest span of paradox. The worst and best things happen at the very same time.”

When she came back from Italy, friends gathered from across the country to rebuild the barn—the post-and-beam raising, captured on film, is a stunning reminder of the goodness of people, who are not just raising up a building, but raising up someone they love. Slowly, over the next two years, she worked on rebuilding the house, too. “I wanted to make it a sculpture, not just a box, a standard house,” she says. She laid the brickwork where her woodstove sits; created a sliding chalkboard to cover the pantry doorway. An artist friend painted a garden on the new living room walls. She wanted a secret door, so she built one in the library, disguised as a bookshelf. The door swings open into her stained-glass studio—a craft she took up after the fire.

“I create something every day,” says Alvin. “And I teach a lot. But really, it’s by creating beautiful things every day that I’m able to combat what would otherwise be crushing depression with the things that I see: drought and poverty and homelessness and forest fire smoke. My mom has Alzheimer’s, and I care for her here. And watching her fade, and living through her fade—that’s incredible. I have to stay positive. I have to stay doing. Otherwise it would be overwhelming.” [Editor’s note: Thea Alvin’s mother passed away after this interview, in December 2023. “She was buried in a natural burial in my backyard,” Alvin says, “in a wicker basket and a shroud made from our goats, carried by her daughters and granddaughters.”]

She saves everything, knowing she will find a way to use it. Sticks from the lilacs, to make tunnels and treehouses. Old nails and shells. And stones, obviously. Because you never know when you’ll need more stones….

The Phoenix Helix

There’s a reason the dazzling spiral that sits in front of Alvin’s house is called the Phoenix Helix. It is not the first. The old one was destroyed two years ago in April by a street sweeper, when the driver fell asleep coming home from work. “It was 7 a.m. They were probably doing 65 miles an hour when they hit it,” she remembers. “It totaled the helix, it just exploded. Stone hit the house, hit the barn, went across the road.”

She heard it from the barn. Stones lay everywhere, shattered, unusable. “It didn’t really hit me until I came out and I was shooting video—I always have my camera—and I could see that it was destroyed. I burst into tears while filming. And I put that video on social media and the world just turned out, because the world knows me for the helix.”

Alvin’s sculpture park was already listed on the map for the Vermont Crafts Council’s Spring Open Studio Weekend, just a month away. “It was an emergency—I needed to show up for the state of Vermont,” she says, “but it was a very difficult technical structure.” Hundreds of people flocked to help, from masons and friends to novices, with Alvin directing every hand. In an astonishing three weeks, the helix was rebuilt, from new stone, on higher ground. The old, shattered stone was incorporated inside—at what is called the “heart” of the wall.

“Everyone asks, ‘How long did it take you to rebuild?’” She pauses, clearly bothered by a question that misses the point. “Sculpture is not like that—or painting or poetry. It’s the cumulative years that get you to the place where you are a master. Yes, it took three weeks of labor with a variety of people. And then the actual build was four days, with 20 people each day. But really”—she gives me a hard look—“it took 30 years of mastering my own craft.”

Going Too Fast, You Are

There is a signpost in Alvin’s backyard, not far from the pizza oven, with signs pointing off in all directions and the names and distances of every place in the world where Alvin has made sculptures, from West Tisbury, on Martha’s Vineyard, to Valle de Bravo, Mexico, to Suzhou, China. There have been multiple voyages to Domodossola, in northern Italy, to restore ancient stone houses through the Vermont design-build school Yestermorrow. And adventures restoring an old stone house in the Portuguese Azores, on the cliff face of a remote island called Flores.

She has created giant time sculptures around the United States. She calls them clocks—structures that operate on solstice, equinox, or birth/death dates. “I really appreciate time,” she says. “I feel like a tiny little sliver of it is given to me to pack some things into.” There’s In Good Time at Duke University in North Carolina; Time and Again at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont; Time Sweeps at Rowan University in New Jersey. And in Tennessee, there is a 1,000-foot-long labyrinth called Time for Love, marking the date a woman’s beloved husband died—on February 24, as the sun rises and angles through a window, it shines at heart level, above a bench in the center of the labyrinth.

“Someday,” Alvin remarks, “the romance and importance of that will be lost. And I love that the mystery of something as simple as one man’s birthday and death day will be completely lost. And people will wonder and ponder and try to figure out why some strange people built these strange things in this place. I love planting the seed of a mystery, because I love to solve the mysteries.”

Time goes hand in hand with stone. The ancient material is inherently contemplative, and so it seems completely obvious why there is a hand-painted cutout of Yoda attached to Alvin’s new barn’s rugged exterior, with the words proclaiming: “Going too fast, you are.” Stone, and everything about this place, is a reminder to slow down.

“When I’m tearing apart walls in Italy, I know that those people who built them 500 years ago were going through their own day-to-day things, just as I am,” Alvin says. “The stone carries the energy of those intentions, and you can feel the old hands of the old workers as they put them together. You can feel their thoughts. You can see it physically, when they were tired. It’s a story you can read.”

And it’s a story that brings us back to hands. When Alvin is working, she can look at the pile of stone, look at the wall, and the next rock is the only rock she sees. “It’s nonverbal,” she tells me. “And I pick it up, and I put it on the wall, and I turn around, and the next rock that goes on the wall is the only rock I see. If I come back with a rock that doesn’t fit in the hole, it goes in another spot. It doesn’t go back. It’s always forward.”  

To see more of Thea Alvin’s creations and to learn about her workshops, go to myearthwork.com/thea-alvin.

The post Vermont Stonework Artist Thea Alvin appeared first on New England.

Faced with a row of garage doors in an innocuous-looking business park in Eliot, Maine, it’s easy to riff on the classic Monty Hall question: What’s behind door number 20?

Frankly, given its anonymous nature, it could be anything. But on this particular day, the door is flung up to the blue sky, and birdsong accompanies my entrance into a cavernous studio overhung with an air of expectation. Rows of wooden shelves sit heavy with unadorned ceramics: bowls, serving platters, planters. Blank canvases, waiting for Elizabeth Benotti to continue her experiments in clay.

The pale, almost ghostly forms are a hint of things to come. Benotti’s eye for shapes—whether she is hand-building, casting in molds, or throwing clay on the potter’s wheel—is cleanly aesthetic. Her feel for color seems equally surefooted, relying on a palette of glazes she creates from scratch in signature shades of bluish-gray, green, yellow, and pink that complement food to dramatic effect.

Simple and strong. And the reaction was positive right from the start, Benotti says. Lifestyle behemoth Remodelista took note. And Anthropologie. And Erin French, at the Lost Kitchen, Maine’s restaurant equivalent of a unicorn, where you can find Benotti’s ceramic hand-pinched baskets (think updated bread baskets) in deep ocean blue, or a herringbone butter dish. “Once I began building more work and posting more, my Etsy shop started getting noticed, too,” Benotti says.

Chalk it all up to her particular world of stripes and those classic herringbones. Great colors. With a few grids, and some oval smudges for good effect. These vulnerable, hand-drawn elements feel like direct outreach—proof of the artisan’s hand.

“Me and words don’t really make good friends,” she says. “Which is probably why I communicate through my hands, you know?” She then confesses, “I don’t sketch a lot—it’s all in my head. Then I just have to make it. It goes back to not being a good two-dimensional artist. I’m not somebody who wants to sit down and draw.” She pauses, hearing herself. “Even though I draw on all my work!”

Those wavy surface textures reach out and communicate, too—they’re Benotti’s actual finger marks. They look like ripples.

Which brings us to Maine. Once Benotti and her husband moved to Eliot, she took up surfing. When she names her ceramic colors, it’s with an eye to the sea. She tells me about a line of work she calls Ebb and Flow—“I was thinking about the push-pull of water, and the shapes coming in and going out.”

When surfing, she says, “you literally forget about everything else that’s going on in your life. You’re in the ocean, you don’t have to care about anything else. You’re just looking for waves.” And when she talks about pottery, she observes, “There’s a lot of holding your breath. I just made a bunch of work that’s black and white—black stripes—and I have to hold my breath every time I’m pulling the brush down the piece.”

Benotti grins. Maybe the same focus hones both endeavors. “I don’t have a grand story for where my inspiration comes from,” she admits. “It’s just seeing colors and color stories that I like, and trying different things.” That, and surfing, makes her happy. elizabethbenotti.com 

Ideal Settings

In studios, barns, and basements, potters dig deep into the earth itself, and work that clay into dishes that enliven seasonal feasts.

1. Jane Herold Pottery

The list of restaurants using Herold’s pottery just keeps scrolling, all with identities as diverse as her dinnerware. But no matter the style, these sleek stoneware plates, platters, and bowls dress up a table as surely as a Michelin star confers honor. “It is the spirit of the maker, and of the materials, still visible in the fired clay, that gives each pot its character,” Herold says. It certainly adds fuller flavor to our food. West Cornwall, CT; janeherold.com

2. Gabrielle Schaffner Ceramics

As a college student, Schaffner spent a year in Florence studying ceramics, art, and language, and she is still inspired by Italian culture—it shows in the colorful, intricate images that adorn her pots. Also, she says, “My studio work is very much influenced by my love of cooking: I like a plate that looks good with food, a large cup to hold plenty of caffè latte, and a pitcher that doesn’t drip.” Boston, MA; gabrielleschaffnerceramics.com

3. James Guggina Ceramics

Who doesn’t love the idea of a dedicated ice cream bowl? Or carved patterns, wood firings, and earthy glazes that translate into handmade dinnerware, coffee filters, whiskey cups, and the random tagine pot? Guggina has been a full-time potter since the early 1990s, and says he’s still learning about pottery making every day. Northampton, MA; coolpots.com

4. Three Wheel Studio

Dwo Wen Chen describes his work as “fun, eclectic, and functional,” with a range of patterns that encompasses cheery birds, intricate flowers, and the elegant River Rock collection, looking very much like a table setting that just washed ashore. Providence, RI; threewheelstudio.com

The post Dishing It Out | Maine Potter Elizabeth Benotti appeared first on New England.

It is nearly impossible not to submit to the presence of driftwood. Smoothed out by the rhythms of time and water, twisted and rubbed clean by the wind, stripped to bare essence, these are the Rorschachs of nature. Forms that speak to a deeper part of our psyche. More primal. More imaginative. Definitely more elemental. They are, after all, literally sculpted by the elements.

Which is why it makes such sense that Michael Fleming calls his work at Designs Adrift “a collaboration with nature.” What else would you call this massive, bleached-bone, perfect tangle of roots sitting on a platform in his barn studio; this hunk of silvery beauty that he hauled from the northern reaches of Maine, then aged for months, smoothed and leveled, and cajoled into bearing a slab of glass, like some windblown Atlas? 

This is a table equally at home on a stretch of beach or in a city loft. He is, Fleming explains, “sculpting with the wind and sea, sun and sky.” And while many driftwood artists concentrate on smaller pieces—mirrors and such—Fleming works on a grand scale, crafting high-end furniture with an artistry that has gained him a following around the world.

It’s a beautiful, sunny day. A steady breeze is blowing on the Phippsburg Peninsula, one of a cluster of dangly peninsulas that grace the midcoast of Maine, and Fleming is delighted that it’s keeping the mosquitos—apparently insatiable gluttons—at bay. It allows a chance to really take in the strangeness and peace of the immediate surroundings. A gray-shingled Cape Cod–style house from the early 1800s melts harmoniously into an open clearing surrounded by conservation land that continues on to Popham Beach. An ell off the back joins the house to the barn, where Fleming dreams and shapes and hones his contemporary driftwood furniture and art in a workshop cloaked in old barn boards. Wood harboring wood. 

Which is all quite lovely, but I still haven’t gotten my mind around the heaps of driftwood in the yard, mountains of it, rising up through the grass and wildflowers. It’s staggering to see so many intricate, perfect pieces of driftwood all gathered in one place. A kind of outdoors workshop annex, where the wood continues to age and weather, except it’s really more like an elephant boneyard, wild and mythic.

“Now this one,” Fleming points to a long, sloping chunk of wood, “will be a bench, with a resin inlay and brushed steel legs, can’t you just see it?” And I can, as his excitement conveys a picture of something that already exists in his mind. Then he hefts a different piece of driftwood, about half the length of a telephone pole, as casually as a 10-pound hand weight. When I ask about his chiropractic bill, he chuckles. “Well, two trips ago, I blew out my back,” he confesses. “I’m getting older now—55, I can’t believe it. I’m very strong, but I’m like, OK, now I have to start stretching.” He grins. “So I stretched, and you know what? My back straightened right out!”

Fleming is rangy, as you’d expect from someone who routinely wrestles large, heavy pieces of wood. (How heavy? We’ll get to that in a minute.) He looks a little like Hal Holbrook, gray hair curling out from under a ventilated baseball cap, with a dash of Crocodile Dundee. And that actually seems about right: amiable, with an underlying restlessness, and a skill set that includes years of experience as a fine woodworker and furniture maker, while the rest is a Tom Mix combo of explorer, treasure seeker, wood wrangler. 

Fleming and his wife, Jennifer, met 25 years ago, in Tortola, where she was vacationing and he was surfing, after delivering a boat from Rye, New Hampshire. They’ve been in this setting for 19 years, together with their son, Finn, 12, and rescue dog, Dee Dee, but before that they spent years traveling—sailing and surfing around the world—while they both worked, he as a carpenter for hire. Later, after settling in Maine, they continued to surf the world: Australia, all through the South Pacific to South Africa. His wanderlust and observations of other cultures began to influence the carpentry skills he carried with him. “All these other countries had this type of furniture that used natural materials,” he says. “And I’m like, wait a minute. I live in the most beautiful state in the world, with the most beautiful material. And nobody’s really refining it.”

Make a bed, said Jenn.

That’s how it began. Fleming crafted a beautiful queen-size bed, with columns of driftwood at the four corners. 

They still have it in their home. And as he tells it, the response to his new work was practically instantaneous. First, it was friends. Then his first show, in East Boothbay, where he exhibited chairs, lamps, mirrors, a few tables. Everything sold. They set up a website around 2010, and from there it just grew. Jenn takes care of the business; he does the rest. “We don’t come from money,” Fleming says. “We did it all with hard work and Yankee ingenuity. I got out of building houses, doing fine furniture. I knew this was what I wanted to do.” 

The other takeaway from his years as a traveling carpenter? Travel light. With a minimum of tools. This, too, translated well into Fleming’s new passion. “When I did fine furniture, I had every tool under the sun,” he remembers. “But when I traveled with my carpentry in developing countries, I had two tools, and sometimes I even had to make the tool. That really resonated with me.” He shows me the two most essential tools he uses now: a hand grinder that helps him shape the wood, and a small Japanese handsaw, about the size of a boomerang, that opens to reveal a row of hungry teeth. “I can cut a massive tree with that,” he says, admiringly. I have no doubt.

And now, to the treasure hunt. 

“It’s so private where I get the wood,” Fleming says. His voice grows quiet. “I was just up at the lakes, way up north of here, for a week. I call it ‘the field,’ where I have wood that’s drying. I camp on a teeny island; it’s completely pristine.” Traveling within a 200-mile radius of home, always in Maine, he haunts the lakes and ocean shores, often camping for a week at a time. It is where he gets much of his inspiration, where he recharges from his studio work. “It helps me connect back to nature, and gives me so many ideas of what’s coming next.”

He tells me about the reality-TV show that wanted to follow him on one of his treasure hunts. Fleming refused. He’s protective of his resources, the way a truffle hunter might be. “People would just come in and grab it all up,” he says. “And the thing is, everybody thinks when I get wood, I just pick whatever. But it doesn’t work that way. It’s a slow process. I don’t just go in and grab, grab, grab. It’s a little piece here, a little piece there. I ride for days. I row for miles. I drag it out.” Always with permission. Always doing everything by hand.

It’s very clear why a reality-TV show would want to tag along. There’s drama in driftwood. Fleming points to a small metal boat sitting off to one side in his yard, so unobtrusive it’s nearly invisible. The battered little aluminum skiff is his workhorse, a 1957 Crestliner, that he even takes out to sea, to the offshore islands. “It’s very small,” he admits. “I could use something bigger, with pulleys, but I have to tread lightly. I’ve gotten stuck. This boat, I can handle by myself.” That’s important when you go out into the wilds. “I go beyond,” he says. “If I get stuck, nobody knows I’m there.”

“How did you haul this one out?” I point to a large mass that looks like a tangle of moose antlers. Fleming grimaces. “Oh God, on my back. Even the guys that deliver my firewood are like, ‘How do you do it?’ I have a backpack that I modified that I can strap on a piece and haul it out.” He adds, as an afterthought, “It’s grueling.”

Fleming goes out in all seasons, but the best time to pick up driftwood is the end of summer, because everything is dry and water levels are low. Out among the islands, or exploring Maine lakes, he will carefully plant a vertical stick to flag the driftwood he’s considering, then come back to revisit. Some of these pieces weigh 400 to 500 pounds when wet, and he has to wait. “I had pieces I tried to get in the boat a few weeks ago, and I couldn’t get them out. They’ll have to dry for a while longer and then I’ll go back.”

He camps under the stars, gathers more driftwood, watches moose stroll by. Gradually he fills his truck, a small Toyota. Then his boat. Hitches them together like train cars, and begins the drive home. It’s easy to imagine the surprised look on people’s faces when they pass him on a Maine highway, trailing this romantic cargo behind him, a tumble of majestic ocean flotsam.

And then he’s home, confronting the possibilities. 

Because finding driftwood is just a beginning. “There’s no way I can include all the time that goes into making a piece—finding the wood, bringing it back, cleaning it, weathering it,” he says. He’ll sand for days, mostly working with hardwood, like oak and maple. His favorite for tables is cedar, because of how it weathers from the minerals in the water and the sun. He points out a piece of spruce, also destined to be a table. And here is “a gorgeous piece of ocean sumac.” 

It’s such a Maine material, he says more than once. “And the colors—there’s no other color like it, it’s so pleasing to the eye.” As if to demonstrate, his eyes skim over the wood. “The natural forms complement any room. That’s what I love—the curves and the color.” It’s so different, he says, from when he was doing fine furniture, and would go to a mill yard to pick out conventional wood. “I like enhancing what’s been done by nature, and continuing that into its final piece.”

Which might end up being anything, from an elongated lamp topped with a drum shade, to an installation, to artwork that incorporates rippling strands of found lobster warp. But one thing is certain: It will be clean and sleek; it will emphasize the wild beauty of this wood, and then some. “When it’s finished it will look nothing like this,” he says, pointing to a weathered stump. “I might add a piece in here that you won’t even notice, and then a piece of metal, because I like incorporating metal-glass-wood. It all marries together.”

So successfully does he blend these elements that his appeal runs the gamut of clients. Fleming has fashioned a 15-foot “tree” to hide a metal post in the Rolls-Royce showroom in Virginia. Installed a huge bald eagle on the exterior of L.L. Bean’s flagship store in Freeport, Maine. Created three loggerhead sea turtles for the town of Marco Island in Florida. His glass-topped tables are coveted from Portland to Paris to Saudi Arabia. 

Up in the hayloft, over the barn, he’s got a stash of smaller, exquisite driftwood, all carefully chosen, a reserve of raw material. Perfect little trees, columns, shapes that resemble antlers, horns, flames, and tusks. Faces peer out of knotholes. Eyes stare off to the sea. Softened and smoothed, this one looks like a heron. This one could be a gull. There’s a dancer, and a whale, and an acrobat. The loft feels alive with motion. And this, in the corner—a wind-knotted twist of beauty. It’s just waiting.  

To see more of Michael Fleming’s driftwood creations, go to designsadrift.com.

The post Maine Driftwood Artist Michael Fleming appeared first on New England.

In no special order, and without provocation, I find myself dreaming of tiny enameled earrings shaped like barnacles, blown-glass eggs with a dash of Jackson Pollock, and a tidy stack of laundry stain sticks.

Such is the diversity that springs forth, like creative bedlam itself, when you gather the work of multiple artists and craftspeople into one place—whether shops or galleries, fairs or festivals. From woodcarvers to potters; painters to lithographers; weavers to well-you-get-it, no medium goes unturned. Inspiration is everywhere, and it’s a veritable cornucopia of talents: audacious, satisfying, and unpredictable.

Coincidentally, it is a shopper’s paradise.

Sometimes the venues can be as ingenious as the treasures they contain. Like The Good Supply, a tucked-away gem on Maine’s Pemaquid Peninsula. Owner-curator Catherine McLetchie assembles the art and craft of 100 mostly Maine makers, her community of creatives, and shares them with such infectious enthusiasm you might be inspired to consider relocating to Maine, possibly to join in.

At the other end of the artisanal-shopping spectrum is its urban counterpart: Western Avenue Studios, a former textile mill in Lowell, Massachusetts. The enormous space is home to 250 artist studios with another 50 live-work spaces that open their doors to the public during monthly Open Studio events. With a coffee bar, brewery, gallery, and food trucks, it’s like an art carnival packed into an industrial space.

Let’s duck inside for a closer look.

Best New England Artisan Hubs, Craft Festivals, and Multi-Artisan Shops

Spotlight: Western Avenue Studios in Lowell, Massachusetts

Surely this is what the creative brain looks like, spread over 265,000 square feet.

It’s practically impossible to visualize this amount of space until you see it: a mountain of brick, a massive sign proclaiming Western Avenue Studios, in an industrial neighborhood in the city of Lowell. Unfolding alongside the Pawtucket Canal (a watery antique completed in 1796), this five-building complex could fill four football fields. It could also win an award for most creative repurposing of a former textile mill. 

More than 350 artists work or live here, in affordable spaces. It’s an incubator where painting, pottery, jewelry, glasswork, clothing, wood, mixed-media, you-name-it, flow out of studios and into the halls. Even the Tiny Arms café infuses art into its small, tasty menu and cheery pottery, with tables and chairs on full view beyond loading-dock doors, raised up on this steamy summer day.

At least once a month, the Western Avenue studio doors are flung open, and the public gets to explore five floors of creative work, visiting makers in their studios, shopping an extraordinary array of crafts. Wander at will or take one of eight self-guided tours. Duck into the Loading Dock Gallery, filled with juried items. When you’re ready for a pick-me-up, there’s Navigation Brewing Company, or assorted food trucks, like the Plantiful Food Trailer, with a veggie sushi bowl and homemade lemon-lavender seltzer to stoke you up.

Impossible to predict what you’ll encounter.…

“Would you like to buy a bookmark?”

I’ve just climbed down a flight of industrial stairs (there are elevators, too) to start at the beginning, on Floor 1, one story below the entrance. And here I encounter siblings Melinda, David, and Shmuel—young entrepreneurs who are eager to share their work, and excited when I buy three. Then they take me to meet their mother, Queen Allotey-Pappoe, who is standing in her gallery, surrounded by the colors of Ghana and the vibrant clothes she makes from them. She is tweaking the Manye (translates to “Queen”) vest a customer is trying on, and it’s probably safe to say this woman has never worn anything quite so full of joy.

“I’ve been dressing women as long as I can remember!” says Allotey-Pappoe, the creative director of her clothing line, Queen Adeline. Her “wearable art” is steeped in sustainability: “I want to help reduce waste in closets, and I only use 100 percent cotton,” she emphasizes. Fabrics that her mother buys in Ghana, and brings to her. “I ask for one thing, she comes with something else,” Allotey-Pappoe nods her head. “And she’s always right!”

The clothes are electrifying. A celebration of women as birds of paradise, capable of wearing magenta geometrics, melon-colored pinwheels, indigo dots in rippling circles. “I express myself in color and print,” she says. The silhouettes are timeless, with pockets “to hide our sins.” She pauses for effect: “And for lipstick!” She is the self-appointed Chief Joy Officer at the studios, even on bad days, because “that energy works for itself. That same energy picks me up!”

Back in the hallway, I set off down a corridor that reminds me of a village street, with alleyways spinning off in different directions. A medieval township of creatives. Who lives behind this door? Or this one?

A hanging handsaw points the way to Woodworkers Row, and I step inside Eric White’s stump-studded workshop. His aptly named Spalt Studio is a forest of lathes and chisels, bristling with woodworking implements. A woodturner by night, he’s also executive director of the Boston Society of Architects, with a past that includes Old Sturbridge Village. Chunks of raw local wood, many salvaged from the side of the road, are heaped to one side, like potential waiting to be polished: a natural-edge oak bowl; swirling grains in slender catalpa; a spalted maple vessel that explores the infinite patterns caused by decay (the definition of spalting); shelves filled with the beauty of trees at every stage of life.

White tells me that Western Avenue is a real community, and I decide to take my time. Each stop turns into a visit, a chance to learn about someone else’s art, what it means to them. And how we can connect through it.

The floors unroll their makers. Here, at MJ Porcelain, are Myong Jung’s hand-built porcelain ears of purple corn, flames of pink asparagus, folds of red cabbage, influenced by 18th-century European work, but blooming out of her experiments with traditional Korean ceramic techniques.

Peter Zimmerman, at Designs in Glass, calls himself “just your friendly neighborhood glass blower,” but his intricate “marbles” contain starry realms—the cosmos captured in glass orbs.

He shares the studio with Tracy Levesque, aka the Birch Lady. I’ve spotted some of her paintings hanging in the halls, but now, in the studio, I’m surrounded by brilliant birches meeting overhead, vibrating in rich autumn colors, or bathed in a lunar glow, in a style she terms “fairy-­tale realism.” Reminiscent of our own world, but “just a wee bit more mysterious and magical.”

Which, in many ways, mirrors this transformed mill building, a place that calls itself “The Creative Soul of Lowell.” Giant paintbrushes dangle overhead in a hallway. Underneath, Hope Greene’s eerie black-and-white photos use antique and modern processes to convey a mix of landscape, myth, and the mind. Over there, a deep velvet maroon couch and chairs to sink into—did I just time-transport into a Victorian parlor? A vitrine displays hand-poured, small-batch Mill City Mercantile candles: Anjou Pear and Woods. “Not All Candles Are Created Equal,” the makers proclaim.

Down yet another corridor, I’ll encounter Barbara Fletcher’s 3-D collages, dark yet hopeful visions of birds and hatching worlds. I pass the Middlesex Bindery on Floor 3, with a stunning faux wall of antique books. Bruce Wood’s dystopian visions of Marvel-Comics-meeting-Tom-Swift spill out from his Glass Ingot workshop. His might be the craziest stop of all: found objects reassembled into antique diving suits, aviators wearing gas masks, fish with comb-like teeth, mad-scientist lamps.

Time for a cappuccino, to sit and let this “creative soul” sink in. I’m inspired and heartened by what I find, the artists I have met. Yes, I certainly shopped. But I came away with a lot more.

Open studios held monthly.

Spotlight: The Good Supply in Pemaquid, Maine

The rain is thundering down, rattling the roof, and this two-story weathered barn, set in a pastoral landscape, is not only providing shelter—it’s dressed top to bottom with enough artwork and handcrafted housewares to conjure a deep sense of home. In fact, I’m ready to move in. “I hear that all the time,” Catherine McLetchie tells me, smiling with genuine delight, as another wave of visitors rolls through the door.

Getting lost is half the fun of getting away, and it certainly feels like I’ve driven off the map. The Pemaquid Peninsula—a picturesque tentacle dangling off Maine’s Midcoast—is only about an hour and a half north of Portland, and it ticks every Maine box. Scenic beauty, lobsters, weathered shingles, rugged cottages. Harbors dotted with fishing boats, crying gulls. Also, a scent of fresh fried fish, which draws me to Pemaquid Seafood right before pulling into The Good Supply.

When McLetchie greets a new customer—“Buckeyes!” she calls out, spotting a sweatshirt—I make friends with “G,” her amiable retriever, and take in the large oil paintings gleaming against rough barnboards. “She’s a real Mainer, doing real Mainer art,” McLetchie says of Jessica Ives, whose sunstruck waterscapes feature swimmers and fishermen. And while I’m certainly no fly caster, I take a deep dive into this painter’s feel for water.

Barn boards and warm light make a good canvas. Liz Martone’s glass mosaics shimmer like shards of shattered light: aqua, black, sea-green. Art dangles from the rafters, literally—leathery sculptural pieces that are the work of Colby College sculpture professor Bradley Borthwick. Among the other notable artists sharing the barn boards is George Mason, whose meditative “relief tapestries” combine encaustic with layered paper cutouts.

McLetchie started The Good Supply in 2012, in a small shed behind the 1850s barn, which was a wreck. A year later, it emerged from the ruins a proud post-and-beam, filled to the rafters with McLetchie’s vision. Housewares were just the beginning, but what housewares: benches draped in Betsy Leighton’s riotously colorful merino wool blankets, alongside her Bowerbird Studio Japanese-style linen aprons. Pottery pieces jostle on cupboard shelves—gold-rimmed porcelain cups that Alexsondra Tomasulo imbues with a “stopping-by-woods” feel that even Robert Frost might fancy. They face off against Soozie Large’s ceramic whisky shot glasses in … chartreuse! Tangerine! Sunflower!

Not to ignore the graphic tea towels by Allison McKeen, and Erica Moody’s forged brass and copper pie servers, but honestly things are tucked in and around everywhere. Like those laundry stain sticks from SoulShine Soap Company that McLetchie swears will remove anything. They’re spilling out of a fragrant corner anchored by a vintage sink filled with other goodies: Copper Tail Farm goat-milk soaps, Island Apothecary body oils, LooHoo’s woolly dryer balls.

Impossible not to touch Tim Christensen’s one-of-a-kind sgraffito porcelains—songbirds and sea life encircle vessels that nest, soar, and defy category. “He wants to make art that people 300 years from now will understand without speaking English,” McLetchie tells me. The practical arts are not ignored, either: here’s a Snow & Nealley splitting maul, the gold standard, hand-tempered in Maine with a lifetime guarantee. A rack filled with Saturn Press cards—letterpress beauties printed on Swan’s Island since 1986—features a slew of Maine’s romantic images: moons, canoes, starry dandelion seeds, brilliant red lobsters.

How is it that I’ve barely moved beyond a few steps, with so much more for me to take in? The barn continues bustling, and now so do I. What about those chunky rings and beaten bangles from Coco Corral’s Loving Anvil? Incorporating raw gemstones, or personal messages hammered into reclaimed brass, silver, and gold? Or these tiny barnacle earrings, rendered in mustard and sea smoke enamel, fresh from metalsmith Kate Mess’s workbench, that evoke “the stubborn crustaceans” she’s observed in her surroundings on the Maine coast?

McLetchie hands me an invitation to her annual summer art party, still a few months off. We all get one, everyone who comes through the door, and Liz Martone—she of the glass mosaics, mentioned earlier—joins the conversation. She’s a close friend and now co-curator in this artistic adventure, helping McLetchie fill the barn with art, craft, community. “Friends for real,” they call it. That phrase comes up a lot, not just with each other, or about the artisans who’ve gathered under this roof, or even when they talk about the yearly art party. We’re all included, all invited, all asked to be part of the barn magic.

Magic that also happens to include a moose puppet. A Shepherds’ Craft Farm ushanka hat that looks like something the Little Prince might wear on other planets. And this glow-in-the-dark Ruth Bader Ginsburg poster. Friends for real.

Open May–October and holidays.

More Craft Festivals and Multi-Artisan Shops to Explore:

Artisans’ Gallery, Waitsfield, VT

Hand-built ceramic birdhouses and brighter-than-life canvases of the Vermont countryside are just a few of the teasers in this 1830s co-op storefront representing more than 150 Vermonters.

Frog Hollow Vermont Craft Gallery, Burlington, VT

The nation’s first state craft center—in the center of busy Church Street—rotates the work of 200-plus Vermonters, with items ranging from hand-carved Windsor chairs to blown-glass fish to Noguchi-style light sculptures.

League of NH Craftsmen Fair, Newbury, NH

Under tents at the base of Mount Sunapee, more than 300 juried artisans bring their best to this nine-day August event, one of the nation’s oldest craft fairs, now celebrating its 90th anniversary. The league also has seven year-round galleries around the state, with wares from its 700-plus juried members.

Paradise City Arts Festival, Northampton/Marlborough, MA

A showstopper that feels like a festival; an extravaganza with 200-plus top-notch craftspeople and fine artists. Artists Linda and Geoffrey Post have been showcasing creativity since 1995 with an event that is its own work of art. March, May, October, November.

Field of Artisans, South Kingstown, RI

Who doesn’t love a pop-up market? And when it’s a field of artisans, it’s truly a field day. Since 2015, creators from around New England have joined an ever-expanding network of more than 700 makers, many of them hailing from Rhode Island, ready to pop up at venues ranging from the General Stanton Inn to South Kingstown Town Beach.

Guilford Art Center Craft Expo, Guilford, CT

This annual outdoor juried show held in July gathers some 180 artisans on beautiful Guilford Green. The center is also a year-round destination for artisan-made crafts, displaying everything that its 100-plus juried makers can dream up, with summer pop-up events.

Island Artisans, Bar Harbor and Northeast Harbor, ME

A showcase for more than 100 Maine artists and makers at two galleries. The owners offer their own hand-spun, hand-dyed yarn, wearable fiber art, and one-of-a-kind clocks.

United Maine Craftsmen Shows, Augusta, Brewer, and Portland, ME

For 50 years, the state’s largest nonprofit craft organization has highlighted Maine’s talent in a juried show that kicks off the holidays, with shows in November and December.

Do you have a favorite spot to shop for New England art and crafts? Let us know in the comments below!

The post Artful Escapes | Best New England Artisan Hubs appeared first on New England.

As a little kid, she went rummaging through antiques stores with her mom, getting a taste for the treasure hunt and the potential lurking in old things. Later, growing up, she would help out at her parents’ restaurant in Woburn, Massachusetts, set in an aging mansion—further enhancing her aesthetic and an eye for possibilities. Flash-forward a few decades to married life in England, a career in film and television production, and a subsequent return to the U.S.

“Why are we living in London, so far from the ocean?” Danielle Driscoll remembers her husband, Luke, asking one day. They remedied that oversight in 2013, buying a century-old gray-shingled gambrel, rugged as a nut, just a few blocks up from Scituate Harbor, a small seaside town on Boston’s South Shore. In the movies, it’s called foreshadowing. In other words, there is every reason why the crisp Atlantic would feature so prominently in Driscoll’s future artistic life.

This is where Driscoll, 45, polished a lifestyle blog she calls “Finding Silver Pennies,” named for a vintage children’s book her mother had given her. “You must have a silver penny to get into Fairyland,” she reads to me, from the title page. It seems like code for entering the world of imagination; the blog, she says, unlocked her creativity. While it initially focused on home life—more of a journal—it quickly changed direction a few months later, when she discovered the wonders of milk paint, and its transformative effects on kicked-to-the-curb furniture. Driscoll’s experiences with brushes and paints, and the skills she acquired and subsequently shared in her online DIY and home decor videos, would lead her to try her hand at watercolors. 

Specifically, to capture the charms in and around Scituate Harbor, where she and her husband were rehabbing their home. In fact, the impressions captured in Driscoll’s calendars, note cards, and paintings seem blown onto the paper by a sea breeze, barely holding on. A suggestion of seashells, a characterful whale, a fleeting lighthouse, a whiff of mojito caught in a saucy glass. The kind of airy seaside pick-me-up that some of us crave mid-January.

“I love painting the ocean,” she says, simply. “Water, shells, natural things. I struggle with structure, buildings, and straight lines.”

The same airy feeling echoes through Driscoll’s sun-washed studio that juts off the side of the main house. The floor is painted white, with a pale blue ceiling. Sketch pads and watercolors are scattered over a round work­table, and a jar of brushes sits handy; the water holder is a small French yogurt pot. Hydrangeas lounge in a dangling wall basket; beach stones sit on the windowsills, soaking up the sun. It’s like a painting spa. “Watching the watery paint on the paper is mesmerizing,” says Driscoll. “Like a meditation.” She’ll use both wet and dry watercolor techniques to create her ocean seascapes, lighthouses, seashells, sometimes adding swipes of acrylic after. 

But the other inspiration for Driscoll resides not down the street, where masts bob in the harbor and seagulls hunker on salt-soaked piers—it’s right here, at home. “Family plays such a big role in my creativity,” she says. She collaborates in an online shop with her 16-year-old son, John, who is “super-artistic,” and prefers to draw on a tablet and paint with acrylics to create his own beachy graphics under the moniker Ink Harbour Illustrations. Her younger son, Conor, 13, helps pack cards (although Driscoll oversees all shipments—her “type A personality,” she says). And Luke, a software engineer who loves woodworking, just finished making a fleet of wooden stands to accompany the 2023 calendars. 

We’re thumbing through a rack of greeting cards—a mix of hers and John’s—in the “packing” area, upstairs. Stacks of 2023 calendars have just arrived. Mother and son donate a portion of every sale to the World Wildlife Fund. On the horizon, Driscoll is planning a line of fabrics and wallpaper. “I don’t know why at a certain point people are taught not to be creative,” she muses, as we’re looking at the note cards. “But that’s why I share the tutorials.” 

And it occurs to me that quite possibly the renaissance women of the present day must have wide expertise in a range of skills. Where blogging leads to DIY, which leads to light-filled watercolors, and then comes full circle, with tutorials where she passes along everything she’s learned. “The first watercolor class I ever took, I wanted to cry,” says Driscoll. And she smiles. “Then I got better.” 

The post The Studio and the Sea | Open Studio appeared first on New England.

In a massive brick mill building seven miles west of Portland, Maine, in the town of Westbrook, I stumble into a world of symbols, the domain of a man who dreams and designs in ancient patterns. Ebenezer Akakpo’s jewelry—wide cuffs, slender bangles, dangling earrings—is adorned with tiny characters called adinkra, strong graphic symbols that appear on fabric, pottery, and artwork throughout his native Ghana. They embody some of the most powerful ideas in any language: hope, unity, bravery, and friendship, among others. 

These traditional Ghanaian characters also dance across his stainless-steel goblets and tumblers, felted trivets, and coasters. And, after 24 years in Maine, Akakpo has even begun to play with the Maine figures familiar to us all—lobsters, moose, lighthouses, chickadees—uniting them in fresh combinations to adorn tote bags, travel mugs, and pint glasses. 

“Which symbol speaks to you?” I ask, as we stand in the midst of his sprawling studio, four large rooms spilling over with proof of an almost hyperactive creativity, with a range of equipment that is dizzying. In the jewelry corner, a simple vise waits to clamp onto something; pliers hang at the ready. He shows me a molded form he dreamed up to make it easier to add a curve to the earrings he crafts of bronze and 22-karat gold plate. 

These old-time tools wait close to three high-tech laser printers, a 3-D printer, and a computer that runs sophisticated design programs. Felted trivets sit stacked on trays like colorful baked cookies; nearby, pillows sport symbols proclaiming Hope; and a tabletop holds cardboard constructions that are the first step in imagining three-foot-tall sculptures to bring his vision to larger life. 

Which symbol indeed? It is a good question, a deep question, a question Akakpo answers quickly.

Endurance. The symbol resembles two hearts, mirror images reversed from each other, joined in the center.

“It takes a lot of endurance and willpower to be doing what I’m doing,” he says, with a deep laugh. “And a lot of patience.” 

He speaks to a life that folds a full day at the Maine Turnpike Authority, where he works as an IT specialist, into his artistic work in his studio until 2 or 3 in the morning. 

His story pours into each earring, each laser-printed water bottle—a lifetime of skills and experiences condensed in all that he makes, starting from his childhood in Ghana, growing up on the campus of a technical training center that taught everything from carpentry to refrigeration. “That gave me my initial interest in making things,” he says. 

In Florence, Italy, he learned stone setting and design at the jewelry school Le Arti Orafe while also drawing inspiration from the jewelry shops around the Ponte Vecchio. “Each artisan could interpret a simple heart shape differently,” he recalls. “That was the first time I saw or experienced innovation in terms of design. And I was like, wow, we have all these symbols in my native country. If I can make these symbols my own, how cool would they be?!” 

Each step brought him closer. From Italy to the Maine College of Art & Design, where he studied metal­smithing and jewelry, then mastering industrial design at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Along the way he learned how to take apart computers and put them back together. Simplified his designs. Streamlined production. “But at the same time, the other thing I learned from jewelry making is not to lose the integrity of what you’re trying to create.”

He presses a dangling earring in the vise, making a gentle curve, then holds it up to the light. The cutout pattern is Abundance—it looks like a sprinkling of flowers, and it gives off a shimmer. To some people, it’s a beautiful piece of jewelry. To others, the symbol might connect to the story of their life, not unlike a tattoo. There’s meaning beneath it.

“Once in a while, when people react in a very unique way to my product, I get curious,” he says. And then he tells me about a woman who visited his booth during a craft show. She didn’t wear jewelry, she told him, but then he brought out a goblet covered with the symbol for Hope. “She just grabbed it from me,” he remembers, “and when I asked her why, she told me she’d lost her husband a month ago. Then I told her the symbol for Hope means that God is in the heavens, listening to our prayers. And she started crying.” 

He looks right at me. “It’s little things like that. You know, it makes me feel like, well, I think I am in control of what I’m doing.…” He pauses, then gives another great laugh. “But I don’t think I really am. I’m just being a channel, and trying to do the work.” akakpo.com  

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Directly across the slender byway sits a little brick home, built in 1820 as a schoolhouse, just marginally bigger than the studio, with an outhouse turned woodshed a few feet away. There’s something about the light, the plants, the surrounding fields, the cozy buildings, the scale of this “micro-homestead,” as Regier calls it, bridging both sides of the road, that makes her world of fiber art—gathered under the name Sky Like Snow—seem like someplace Bilbo Baggins could call home. Or the hidden domain of a medieval herbalist.

Here, working between the two buildings, Regier weaves and knits, seemingly out of the elements, shawls and hats and scarves that are suffused with the colors she gathers from the land around her. Colors drawn from plants she grows down by the creek, or in her backyard, or that she has foraged, gently, from the woods that climb behind the fields. Japanese indigo, wild madder, dyer’s chamomile, buckthorn, rhubarb, goldenrod. Mushrooms that turn to teal, roots that go red, bark that stains orange, and leaves that go all shades of blue—the essence of nature, yielding colors as harmonious as nature itself.

Dyeing can be as simple as boiling mushrooms in a stainless-steel dye pot on the stove in her kitchen, straining out the mushrooms, and then stirring in skeins of yarn; or as complex as the multistep process of extracting and fermenting indigo over the course of days before the dye bath is ready. And the textures, soft and springy. “It’s the nature of the type of yarn I use—squishy and fine, from wool and alpaca that I buy from local farmers and have spun at a little fiber mill in New Hampshire,” Regier says. 

She’s been knitting since she was 8. Her mother has been a fiber artist, a weaver, since before Regier was born. “I was just fascinated with the idea that you could make your own clothing and cloth,” she remembers. “That’s still a driving force. It’s so amazing that you can take these materials and make something solid.” And yes, she wears her own hats. Even indoors, and to bed.

Right now, on a traditional 32-inch-wide loom that occupies most of the second-story loft of her brick house, she’s strung an entire spectrum of indigo-dyed threads that she’ll weave into large square bandannas that can be “draped over a chair, wrapped around your neck, wrapped around your head or waist.” Across the street, in her stone studio, it’s a trip back to the ’60s, with a knitting machine “from the avocado-green era,” a treasure dug from her parents’ barn. Little teeth move the thread in a chattering, hypnotic stream, knitting a pattern that Regier has first painted with dye on the wool/alpaca yarn. The resulting landscapes trail across finely wrought, small-stitch watch caps and slouch hats so soft it feels like you’re stroking a cloud.

The colors in the bandannas ebb and flow like breath. And when she spells out the provenance of all the colors in a single bandanna, it sounds like something Shakespearean, minus the eye of newt. “This purple comes from a lichen,” she says, pointing. “And this pink, that’s a mushroom. This is dyer’s coreopsis, and here is weld, overdyed with a tiny bit of indigo.” She says she doesn’t choose the color palette: “It’s really what the natural dyes give me. So some of it is on the earthy side, but there are also wild pops of color from purples and indigo.”

She talks about terroir, that ineffably delicate interplay of land, water, and air that affects everything growing. We taste its effects in wine. But equally we see its effects on plants, mushrooms, and their dyes, varying from year to year. “I recently did a project where I collected Hydnellum mushrooms from 30 different patches that I’ve been visiting over the years,” she says. “It literally produced 30 different colors of teal.”

So when you look at one of Regier’s hats, or a scarf or wrap, you’re actually catching a glimpse of the landscape all around here, in Athens, Vermont. In any given year, it will be different. And it’s a peek at the secrets hiding in the indigo plant or that sliver of mushroom. 

“It was kind of a light bulb going off when I connected the natural dying to being on the land, knowing the land,” she says. “Then realizing everything around me was a dye.” And there’s no predicting how this confluence of elements and materials will turn out—like this lovely woven wool and alpaca scarf drenched with memories of vibrant buckthorn bark. skylikesnow.com  

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Fifteen minutes south of busy Portland, on Prouts Neck, in Scarborough, Maine, you can literally step into Winslow Homer’s landscapes, many nearby the famous painter’s studio, which you can tour through the Portland Museum of Art.

Or you can just relax and let the rugged scenery wash over you like a breaking wave.

Either way, you’ll get a stiff dose of sea air and inspirational vistas.

Winslow, famed for his tempestuous seascapes, moved to Prouts Neck in 1884, where the Homer family had begun spending time as early as 1875, eventually building a house there.

Although Winslow and his father had a difficult relationship, the artist situated his studio right next door to the family home, converting the carriage house for his own use. Separate but together. Certainly, his stormy paintings speak volumes of emotion.

“I prefer every time a picture composed and painted outdoors. The thinking is done without your knowing,” Winslow wrote the year he moved to Prouts Neck permanently.

To reinforce that elemental connection, he further declared: “The sun will not rise, or set, without my notice, and thanks.”

Fast forward to 2016. Where better to set forth exploring Prouts Neck than from the prow of the 1878 Black Point Inn, in Scarborough.

“Prow” translating to that elegant, rounded porch overlooking a blindingly white row of Adirondack chairs on the lawn below, all oriented toward the expansive waters of Saco Bay, like needles to a compass point.

The stately wood-shingled summer hotel has warm wood inside, brilliant sun outside, plus an outdoor eating terrace, and really good food.

All this, and just around the corner from Winslow’s place.

After 20 years of living in NYC, the artist hired John Calvin Stevens to adapt the family’s carriage house into a 1,500-square-foot studio, where he lived until his death in 1910. The setting is stunning. From the second story, you can look out over the sea. And the path leading along the rocky coast gives you a taste of what Winslow saw and fell in love with.

Skittish water. Tossing boats. Rocky coastlines. Bursts of flowers. The rustle of tumbling rocks. Light that shifts like a shuddering sail.

To tour Winslow’s studio, stop by the Portland Museum of Art, where you can also see the artist’s original paintings, or purchase your tickets online.

After, save time to explore the delicious expanse of Scarborough Beach.

Or dart over to Higgins Beach, also in Scarborough, for an elemental plunge in the Atlantic. Depending on the time of day or year, you’ll be sharing the silky sand with surfers, wind surfers, kids, and dogs, all relishing the ultimate antidote to stress.

Then wind your way back to the Black Point Inn and plunk down in your own Adirondack chair. The setting sun lays down a fiery path across the water. Time to soak up some Winslow Homer light.

Have you ever explored Prouts Neck?

This post was first published in 2016 and has been updated. 

SEE MORE:
Things to Do in Scarborough, Maine | Coastal Weekend Getaways
10 Favorite Things to Do in Maine | A Yankee Bucket List
10 Prettiest Coastal Towns In Maine

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The Marginal Way, in Ogunquit, Maine, is anything but. Marginal, that is—in the traditional sense of the word.

Merriam-Webster defines “marginal” as “very slight or small,” or “not very important.”

Quite the opposite is true here.

In fact, of course, the name actually refers to the “margin” between land and sea. This slender 1 1/4-mile-long beauteous cliff walk is a winding path of windblown gorgeousness that edges the Atlantic like a tightrope strung along the heights.

The view spreads out and down—to the icy, thundering seawater, smashing against rocks, spraying out over tide pools, buffeting seal-smooth wet-suited surfers and divers.

Everyone has a different way of enjoying it.

Both the “to” and “fro” of this walk are equally tantalizing. One end of the Marginal Way starts near Ogunquit’s surreally beautiful three-mile stretch of sandy beach and dunes.

The walk finishes up at Perkins Cove, a little movie-set concentration of cuteness that also happens to be a working dock for the fishing boats that come and go like, well, like fishing boats.

The beauty of this beautiful walk cannot be overstated. Nor can the overall friendliness of the experience, in every sense of the word. Physically, there is little climbing involved, and definitely maximum payoff for the little climbing that you will do.

And on the topic of personal friendliness, your fellow walkers will be a cheery bunch overall, and why not? You’re basking together in Maine treasure.

For that reason, too, we must also give great thanks for the 39 benches placed strategically along the way, affording multiple opportunities to ponder, exclaim, or just sit.

Here are some additional high points.

Once you leave the beach at Ogunquit and slip down tucked-away Wharf Lane,

you’ll merge onto busy Shore Road.

From there, you’ll saunter along until you reach the very-obvious entry path to the Marginal Way, flanked by hotel gardens with flaring views of water and sky.

The cork-screwing path meanders past the hotels’ manicured lawns and a few mostly-modest houses wedged above the walkway. Then it winds, down and around rocky flats stacked with cairns, and through shady groves, and always and ever, there’s the sea.

You’ll pass a cool little lighthouse,

and get lots of ideas of ways to spend your time here. Obviously there’s fishing and surfing, as well as talking on your phone or taking pictures. But you’ll also see some unexpected diversions, like chess,

treasure hunting,

and sketching.

Reading is always an option, too,

or just plain contemplating.

And when you’re ready for a little action, Perkins Cove is just around the corner, with lively restaurants,

lobstermen,

and the freshest catch of the day.

Take time on your return stroll to check out the monuments scattered along the Marginal Way. One of the bronze plaques is scripted with the words of John Muir:

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and cheer, and give strength to body and soul alike.

Here is a path promising just that. An easy walk, with 39 benches, each one numbered, so you can claim a favorite.

Find a bench with your name on it.

Have you ever strolled the Marginal Way?

This post was first published in 2013 and has been updated.

SEE MORE:
10 Prettiest Coastal Towns in Maine
Summer in Ogunquit, Maine | Photos
New England Ocean Walks

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Greenhead flies, named for their large, bright green eyes, can be found in the coastal marshes of Eastern North America. Unfortunately for us, that means they love New England’s beaches.  Knowing about these pests can help you plan your next beach trip the safe way — away from the painful bites of greenhead flies.

The wild serenity of the salt marsh stretches from Maine to Florida. It is a world caught between worlds, a lovely transitional swath of emerald grass that snakes along the Atlantic coastline, occupying a territory somewhere between sea and solid ground.

This line of demarcation between solid and liquid is neither and both. The ground of the salt marsh is springy, like walking on a lumpy trampoline. Water oozes up through tufts of matted grass, potholes lurk beneath seemingly solid ground.

Who inhabits this spongy world? Apart from the occasional deer, there are turtles, assorted birds, mice, and, once in a while, a rabbit, a raccoon, or an otter, mostly just passing through. Which means it’s slim pickings for one small, hungry inhabitant, whose appetite revs into high gear ’round about mid-July.

Like ripening fruit at the moment of perfection, Tabanus nigrovittatus emerges from the salt marsh at summer’s midpoint. She has just laid her first batch of eggs. Two hundred or so microscopic dots, but who’s counting, because right now she’s out of her mind with hunger, and it’s time to get down to the business at hand. Her first blood meal. Ever. In her young adult life she’s never had a solid meal, subsisting mostly on nectar, preferring to wait until the whole egg-laying business is behind her. By doing so, she ensures that the precious bloodline will continue, that the next generation of greenhead flies–as she is more commonly known–will be born. But right now she’s paying the price. And there’s not a thing to eat.

A stone’s throw from the unearthly beauty of the salt marsh, some of the great New England beaches sprawl beside the Atlantic, baking in the sun: Crane Beach, in Ipswich; Plum Island, off the coast of northeastern Massachusetts; Hammonasset Beach, unfurling along the Connecticut side of Long Island Sound. A brilliant blue sky stretches overhead; a faint breeze ruffles the grasses. Perfect beach weather. A great day to fly. Her dazzling green eyes casting about, she makes a beeline for the water. The sand up ahead is swarming with warm, scantily clothed bodies, fairly bursting with reservoirs of succulent human blood.

“Greenheads,” says the blond boy barricaded in the entrance booth at Hammonasset Beach State Park. He slides open a window and points to a squashed bug taped to the side of the building. “They’re pretty bad today. You may want to think about it.”

Given the size and spread of the flattened insect, “pretty bad” seems like a PR understatement. The little torpedo is more than half as long as my thumb, and even mashed up it’s easy to imagine hordes of greenhead flies making for the beach like vacationers racing to claim their patch of sand. Like most beachgoers, tabanids prefer warm, sunny days, and it is, of course, an especially beautiful July morning, without even a hint of breeze. The sun is already fierce, the distant sand shimmers with promise, and the sea is as blue as the Aegean.

But a face-off with greenhead flies? Their size makes them fairly immune to bug repellent, and slathering on DEET isn’t a very appealing option. Do I want to spend a day swatting these things? I squint at this poster child for a bad day at the beach, weighing the pros and cons. In full knowledge that at this very moment, a similar scenario is playing out, up and down the East Coast. Cars backing up, just as I’m about to do, turning around and heading home. Or at the very least, somewhere far from the coastal salt marshes.

And that’s when I get curious.

What’s up with this bug? Clearly it’s a robust type of horsefly (the name is a tip-off), and it certainly outweighs its relative the deerfly, although both biters belong to the same fly family, Tabanidae. And “greenhead” obviously refers to its enormous green eyes, laced with bands of iridescent red or purple.

But above and beyond these physical characteristics, and the fact that greenhead flies will indiscriminately attack horses, cows, dogs, hogs, and deer, this fly is notorious mainly for one thing: the pain it inflicts in large numbers on beachgoers at the height of summer. Make that two things, because like The Terminator, this fly is relentless. It will not stop until someone pays the price.

Stories of encounters with greenheads have a dramatic quality usually reserved for plays written by one-name ancient Greeks. But the blunt truth is that these creatures can ruin a day, or days, at the beach.

Often during peak greenhead season–generally early or mid-July to mid-August–beaches will post warnings about fly conditions, like some weird variation on the surf report. At Crane Beach there’s another sign, too: No Refunds. But it’s not about singling out one beach or another; any gathering spot near a salt marsh–beach, restaurant, or home–is potentially vulnerable. Sometimes it’s just a matter of degree.

“All salt marshes on Cape Cod provide habitat for greenhead flies,” says Gabrielle Sakolsky, entomologist and assistant superintendent at the Cape Cod Mosquito Control Project. “Our largest marshes, adjacent to the large barrier beaches of Sandy Neck and Nauset, are the worst, because they have the largest amount of larval habitat. There are no immune spots.”

If that’s the case, I suddenly have more questions. Can greenheads be outsmarted? What makes them so rabid in the first place? Why is the pain so fierce? And don’t we have any options?

In search of answers, I’ve found myself knee-deep in a salt marsh with John Stoffolano, Ph.D., professor of entomology at UMass Amherst. It’s early August: prime tabanid time.

Every summer, Dr. Stoffolano and his students head into the dark heart of greenhead territory–the broad and glorious salt marshes that spread out around Pine Island, in Newbury, Massachusetts, not far from Crane Beach. Here they collect thousands of flies from the shiny black wooden boxes that stagger on slender legs across the marsh, like dark, square animals imagined by a Cubist carpenter. Back at UMass, they conduct research on greenhead behavior and physiology. “We’re the only ones doing this kind of work,” Dr. Stoffolano told me when I first visited his office in Amherst, months earlier. “At one time there was a lot of interest.”

That was before scientists learned that tabanids do not in fact carry Lyme disease or AIDS, that they’re merely a horrible nuisance. But in the 30-plus years he’s been researching these greenhead flies, Dr. Stoffolano has learned a lot, and he’s got the office to prove it. Bookshelves overflow with the chaos of his profession–research materials, scientific papers (many his own), and reference books–the contents spilling onto the floor, the desktop, any available surface.

In sharp contrast to its occupant, who is neat, self-contained, and, it turns out, pretty funny, with an adventurous streak. Tales of tsetse flies in South Africa, encounters with biting beach flies in the Seychelles, and experiences at a Zulu healing ceremony weave in and around talk of greenhead flies. His mother is part Mohawk Indian, and Dr. Stoffolano’s interest in indigenous cultures and insects has gradually evolved into a college course on cultural entomology, in which he uses insects to teach diversity, while incorporating references to art, music, mythology, and archaeology. Traces of Indiana Jones, minus the bullwhip.

Over the next few hours, I get a crash course in greenhead flies: Tabanids 101, if you will. For instance, I learn that the males don’t bite. Only the female is out for blood, but when she first takes flight, she’s actually a vegetarian. It’s a little like hearing that sharks prefer salad. (The seeds of bloodlust are sown early, though; the larvae are carnivorous and cannibalistic, and if there’s nothing else handy, like an earthworm or some other type of larva, they’ll eat each other.)

“Before she’s laid her eggs, you can even let her take a walk on you,” Dr. Stoffolano insists. “When the males and females emerge from the pupa stage, they feed on carbohydrates, like nectar or honeydew, for energy, for flight. That’s their gasoline. But once the female lays her eggs, her whole behavior changes. She becomes extremely aggressive. In this second cycle she’s seeking a host–cow, deer, human. She needs to have a blood meal if she’s going to lay another batch of eggs.”

Then he shows me the photos. And now I understand why it hurts.

Unlike the delicate mosquito, which is a vessel or capillary feeder, drawing blood much like a syringe does, tabanids are pool feeders, meaning they sever lots of capillaries at once, in order to create a gaping wound so that the blood can pour out. Close-ups of the greenhead’s tiny mandibles reveal an unsettling similarity to a pair of deadly, razor-sharp scissors, able to slice through skin like a knife through mayo. Tiny temperature receptors on the insect’s antennae have already detected whether or not the host is warm-blooded. Now that she’s attached, two other mouthparts pull her head deeper and deeper. She’ll keep on sucking until you smack her away. Then she’ll come back for more. Over and over and over.

At first, according to Dr. Stoffolano, it doesn’t hurt. “I’ve watched them go all the way down into my hand,” he says matter-of-factly. “They probe the skin for temperature, then they pierce the skin, and then they salivate. The saliva contains an anticoagulant so that the blood doesn’t clot. As soon as they release saliva, which is a foreign protein, our bodies react to it and we sense pain. That’s when we swat ’em.”

Pain is the greenhead’s great enemy. The very thing she does so well keeps her forever hungry: The viciousness of her bite practically guarantees that it will be difficult for this insect to get a good meal. But here’s where Nature’s brilliant adaptability comes through, letting the greenhead make the best of a bad deal.

“There’s not a lot of blood out on the salt marsh,” Dr. Stoffolano says. “They probably never get a good blood meal. So they’ve evolved a strategy of being able to lay the first egg batch without taking a blood meal. And that’s one of the major problems in controlling this fly. You’ve seen all the traps, right?” I nod my head. Anyone who’s driven the East Coast during the summer months can’t miss the black boxes strewn about the salt marshes up and down the Atlantic. “All those females that go into the traps have already laid a batch of eggs first. So you’re not cutting down on the population. What you’re cutting down on is the biting frequency and the nuisance factor. The traps are nuisance control.”

Which is still better than nothing, he acknowledges. Greenhead adults live three to four weeks, so the population builds up. They’re strong fliers, too, so if they can’t find a meal at the beach, they’ll fly a couple of miles inland. And although on a good day a greenhead can lay up to 200 eggs in what may be her first and last reproductive act, these dark, heavy traps–painted black to mimic large animals, like cows–can attract and capture up to 1,000 greenheads per hour. That’s good news for beachgoers, boaters, and anyone who lives nearby.

Frankly, short of spraying the entire East Coast, there aren’t a lot of other options. The insects themselves are too big to eliminate without using massive amounts of pesticides, which would damage the delicate salt-marsh habitat. Besides, greenhead flies play a couple of important roles within that fragile ecosystem. First, as an indicator of marsh health. And second, as a food source: Their spring larvae are consumed by shorebirds and fish, while adult greenhead flies are protein for purple martins and tree swallows. Eat or be eaten.

“The other problem we face with these greenheads is the vastness of the salt marsh,” Dr. Stoffolano adds. “It goes from Texas all the way around Florida, all the way up the East Coast, up into Nova Scotia. It’s a huge area. How do you control such a vast area?”

Meanwhile, I’m about to visit my first trap. I’m wading through thigh-high grass with Dr. Stoffolano and his wife, Susan, headed toward one of the greenhead traps alongside the road that cuts through the marsh around Pine Island. I’m wearing light-colored clothing, because greenhead flies zero in on dark, moving objects, and I’m covered head to toe, despite the blazing heat. We approach the first black box–it’s buzzing audibly.

“That’s a sound you don’t want to hear,” Susan Stoffolano observes, as we peer through the thick screen on the top of the box, reinforced so that birds can’t tear it apart to get at the insects. Inside, the box is crawling with tabanids, and two interior troughs are littered with corpses. There’s no bait; the insects enter from below, fly up to the light, and then can’t figure out how to exit. (The Northeast Massachusetts Mosquito Control & Wetlands Management District installs and maintains the boxes, but lets Dr. Stoffolano remove greenhead flies as needed.)

Together, he and his wife unscrew a corner of the trap, drape towels over sections to direct the flow of insects, and position a mesh carrier over the opening. Low-tech, but it works. It quickly fills with live flies, and we move on to the next trap. A steady breeze blows, keeping us mostly fly free.

Listening to all this buzz reminds me of a story Dr. Stoffolano told me about how horses were once used on the marsh around Pine Island to help cut salt-marsh hay, which even today is prized by gardeners for inhibiting weeds: “They made nets out of ropes that completely covered the horse, so that as the horse moved, it would dislodge any tabanids that were trying to bite.” And even in modern times, rumor has it that sometimes the postmen around Newbury and Pine Island will balk at delivering the mail, because greenhead flies are attracted to the moving mail truck and get trapped inside with its unlucky driver.

So what’s a human to do? I ask the horsefly expert for any words of wisdom, recommendations, last-minute thoughts.

“If it’s the season of the fly in your area, you gotta wear light-colored, protective clothing,” he replies. “They can’t bite through your clothes. And I would suggest that more beaches post Web sites. If it’s a heavy day for greenheads, don’t show up at the beach; you’re wasting your money. Forget about it. If you’re a restaurant, and you don’t want people sitting outside to be bitten, then you put traps up.”

His hand flashes before me, and with a graceful swipe he captures a renegade greenhead, crawling on top of the trap. “They’re beautiful creatures, aren’t they?” he smiles. He’s gripping the insect in a sort of tiny Heimlich maneuver, so that it can’t bite him, and then he holds it up to my face for a closer look. I’m staring into a pair of huge (relatively speaking) green eyes. “Look at those eyes,” he marvels, and then releases it.

Two hundred more eggs, if she gets a solid meal, I think to myself. And we watch her fly away.

Has your vacation ever been impacted by greenhead flies? Tell us about it!

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