Wednesday Adventures

By David Gibson -

On Wednesday we had plans to take an extended jaunt around the Pioneer Valley with our friend Sean Greene, a painter I met at UMass Amherst when I first came here in 2003. Weirdly enough he is my only male friend up here. He is a very happy go lucky guy, ex-musician, father of two, and makes beautiful abstractions that are originally inspired by the gesturality of graffitti and skateboarding but are very much about color, tonality, and what I like to call the 'keyhole effect,' a scaling of perspective beyond the edge of the canvas.

Sean picked us up at our lodging and we proceeded to take a leisurely tour of the local landscape. We ended up at Cook Farm which raises cows, chickens, and rabbits. It is mainly a dairy farm and has many young and older cows in different pens. When.we arrived a young girl had stopped off the roadside to pet them. We walked around and took a lot of adorable pictures of the various animals. We bought fresh ice cream brownies and cookies to take with us.
After that we went to a huge and hidden bookshop located under a barn and a local water tower festooned with solar panels. This was Gray Matter Books and Troubador Books, sharing a vast and suggestively subterranean space that was like a landscape all of its own. I found an autobiography of George Grosz, a volume of the complete letters between Henry Miller and Anais Nin, volume 3 of The Foxfire Series about country living in the Ozark Mountains, and poems by Philip Levine. Bird found some wonderful volumes of vintage childrens books.

We had lunch at The Lady Killigrew Cafe at The Montague Book Mill, a magical place that Bird and I first visited when we came up.together for the first time two years ago. This old mill.building houses a cafe, gallery, restaurant, cafe, and bokshop with sweeping views of the passing river. I can never get enough of this place.

After that we attended a reception at the University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass Amherst for a video artist Eija Liisa Ahtila. We met the director and curator and some local artists and writers. We were ready to crash and it was only 7:00 pm.














Location: Amherst Center, Amherst Center

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