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Gary Genetti’s glassblowing career began in the off season. He was an apple tree pruner, which is winter work. In the summer he built houses. That’s where he met a mason who, after taking a six-week glassblowing course in Rochester, set up a studio in his garage in Vernon. A recent art school graduate, Gary started collecting scrap from glass factories and turning it into art nouveau style paperweights and perfume bottles. It was the late seventies; the price of antique glass was on the rise and studio glassblowing was in its infancy. The market was wide open, and Gary’s pieces sold.
Thirty years later, the furnace in Gary’s hot studio in Warwick glows white-yellow. Out of the “glory hole” come baubles like glass onions and apples; masterpieces like a tri-colored urn on which an etched heron balances on a dead tree, poised to take off over a glassy lake; and even furniture, like a glass bench that is actually quite comfortable thanks to tiny squares that act like cushions. Gary’s work is on display in museums and he has graced the cover of Smithsonian magazine.
But it is not these pieces, which sell for hundreds or thousands, that Gary shows me first. “My [traditional] work is mostly for the one percent,” he says. “This new project is more accessible, inclusive of the community.”
On a long work table, a few large bowls or birdbaths, half a dozen small bowls or maybe ashtrays, and two light fixtures are on display. These are prototypes made, like Gary’s earliest work, from salvaged junk. This upcycling project is still so new that he doesn’t want “a lot of press.” All right then – a little press.
This time, the raw material is broken safety storefront glass from Country Glass in Vernon, and windshield glass picked out of totaled cars at Specht’s salvage yard in Warwick. His older daughter collects the glass from the junkyard, his younger daughter cleans it, and Gary slumps the broken glass either into or onto a mold and fuses it in the oven. If he’s making something that will hold liquid, he fuses the glass bits to a sheet of window glass. He’s been experimenting with polishing to give that beach glass look, or brushing on color enamel used for stained glass.
Because the technique Gary is inventing is low tech and takes little skill once it’s set up, it can be replicated anywhere in the world. But first, Gary’s going to need a bigger oven. He’s got his eye on the old Orange Correctional Facility, which had workshops for the prisoners, and whose next chapter is under discussion. If this catches on, junkyards the world over could become quarries for art that has value and a great back story.
Warwick's Black Rock Shelter has endured fire, ice, wind and rain.
Some thin places are fragile. I was planning on writing about the all-season delight of the mile-long walk on the Appalachian Trail Boardwalk off Glenwood Road in Vernon, across a flood plain and the suspension bridge over the Pochuck River. For years I have been walking that crooked path low through wetlands, over a river and back onto land.
That was before Hurricane Irene returned the flood plain into a form of the pre-historic lake it used to be. The boardwalk was made by volunteers over a seven-year period after 17 years of planning and acquiring the land. It was designed, smartly, to float up a bit during high water, but the waters of Irene were way too much and actually displaced the whole boardwalk. The New York-New Jersey Trail Conference is gathering people to help fix this and many of the natural trails in the region. You can help (nynjtc.org).
And some thin places endure. I’ve been visiting area rock shelters, natural caves where there is evidence of human use for thousands of years. Yes, I want to sit where they sat! “They” are bands of Delaware or Lenni-Lenape Indians… and who knows before that?
Just outside Florida, off Route 17A on Quarry Road at a “Protected Area” sign, the land rises to the famous Dutchess Quarry Caves, a huge cavern that has been dated back 12,000 years. Other shelters on the property were blown up years ago by the quarry owners. There are many smaller shelters around that have been dated to the Late Archaic period, about three to four thousand years ago.
One is in Warwick just off Brady Road and Magnolia Lane. Just before the first house on the right on Magnolia Lane, you can bushwhack up a small hill to “Mount Lookout,” the rocky outcroppings that form the shelter. Go find it and sit.
– Daniel Mack, Warwick
Share your thin places at dirt-mag.com.
Photos by Mike Bloom / Story by Dirt
Sculptor Zac Shavrick, 24, digs through the dumpsters outside Brakewell Steel in Chester for the scrap metal he’ll weld into creatures resembling Kafkaesque beetle-men or aliens from Independence Day. He’s been diving for scraps since he was 3, when his dad, also a sculptor, would lift him into the dumpster to pick out metal bits.
Where to find scrap, and just about everything else a sculptor needs to know, Zac learned from his dad Barry. Father and son share studio space in the form of a rundown barn in Ferndale, Sullivan County. Barry, the artist behind a Judaica sculpture garden (think giant menorahs) in the Hasidic hamlet of Monsey in Rockland County, got his start as a gate welder in Israel.
Zac seeks out other mentors, too, like J.J. Veronis, a Brooklyn street sculptor, and the professor who taught him bronze casting at SUNY Purchase, where Zac earned his fine arts degree.
“I don’t know if it was necessary,” Zac said of his formal schooling. “But it was fun.”
His financial success has come in fits and starts. Right now he’s in the middle of what you might call a scrapload of work. The recession inspired Zac to go smaller and cheaper.
He advertised an offer: send in a photo of yourself and get back your sculpted 10-inch likeness, in human or monster form. Zac got 150 commissions.
These little guys only take Zac about two hours a pop, but they take a toll in frustration.
“With big sculptures, I have time to think about my next move. With little sculptures I’m constantly making directorial decisions on each step. Every move counts. The smaller you go, the more difficult it is. The tools I’m using are built for much larger-scale.”
Zac’s next move is going to be a 50-foot sculpture “you’d actually be able to interact with a little.” So if you see a rusty 30-ton beast with lion body and the head of a man emerging from a barn, it’s not the second coming. It’s just Zac.
Somehow we find them. Places, landscapes, resting spots where just being there makes us feel different. These are called thin places, where the border between here and there, and now and then, gets dissolved.
One little jewel of a place is hiding right in the Village of Warwick. Lewis Woodlands is off Robin Brae Ave., which is off Rt. 94/Maple Ave. on the way to Florida. It used to be part of one of the big estates that’s been split up in the last century. These 14 acres hold beauty, mystery and wide history in the easy half mile loop of an old carriage path. Enter across a small field and a footbridge over Witch’s Brook, a clear, narrow finger of the Wawayanda creek. (Actually, all the small water bodies in the region were once just called the Wandering River. They all made their way to the Wallkill. This was confusing to the more literal-minded settlers, so they named and re-named each little branch as it if were distinct. Well, this is Witch’s Brook. The mayor of Warwick told me that when he was a boy playing in these woodlands there was an old woman living in a small house further up, and that’s really why it was Witch’s Brook.)
But that’s only the beginning. I took Tom Brannan, a local surveyor and archeologist, there a few years ago and he excitedly found what looked to me like just a pile of stones. He verified that this was a pile of stones created before the American Revolution by a British survey team mapping the colonies. But there’s more! Someone keeps making small cairns – balanced rock sculptures – along the path. Regulars in the woodlands claim to have never seen who it is, yet always the cairns are fixed and altered. Finally, there’s a craggy area with big boulders that features chert, that black mineral used to make primitive points and tools. This is a small but easy-to-visit quarry. Go see, feel for yourself.
And, any and every time you can, find the intersection of Brady Road and Bowen Road on the Warwick-New Jersey border. Oh, the stone walls, the dipping roads and views!
Daniel Mack, Warwick
Share your thin place in the comments here.
Benedictine Monk Brother Victor makes organic vinegars in LaGrangeville. Pictures by Francesco Mastalia
Warwick photographer Francesco Mastalia is tracking down organic farmers and chefs and trying to get them to sit absolutely still for half a minute. Eventually, he’ll make the portraits and accompanying interviews into an art book: “Organic: Farmers & Chefs of the Hudson Valley.”Mastalia is one of about a hundred people in the world using the 19th century wet plate collodion process. That’s how the portrait of Lincoln on the five dollar bill was shot. He uses large wooden cameras, antique brass lenses, and hand coated glass plates, and develops the photo in trays of water and fixing agent, on site, in a portable dark room. Temperature and humidity affect the process, so each image has a life of its own.
Guy Jones of Blooming Grove supplies produce to high-end restaurants in the city like Tabla and Eataly
“When digital photography came around, I ran in the opposite direction,” Mastalia said. “It in itself is an organic process. There’s no way to take the same picture twice. Even the way you pour chemicals on the plate becomes a factor in how the plate will look.”
Mastalia has traveled the world photographing tribal, religious, spiritual and indigenous people. His last book, “Dreads,” a photo documentary on the history of dreadlocks, is published in four languages. Now he’s turning his focus home.
“The food movement in the valley is just growing and growing,” said Mastalia. “You meet a completely different breed of person at farmers markets.”
- Cheryl Rogowski of Pine Island is one of two farmers to have won a MacArthur genius grant.
Photo by Nick Zungoli
Thin places are places that feel different, where you can sense something else. It may be your own garden in the early morning or as the sun sets, or a lookout, a road, a special water feature, tree or rock that “says” something each time you see it. Here are a few of the thin places I know about, all within two miles of one another.
Route 94, the major route between Sussex and Orange counties, was also the major trail for the Lenape, the last Native Americans to live in this area. Off this road are some of the great thin places in the area. In Vernon at Maple Grange Park, on Maple Grange Road, is the now protected 40-acre Black Creek Site, a major Lenape Indian campsite. More than 15,000 artifacts, some dating back to 8,000 BC, have been found there. Sussex County Community College is doing archeological field work there this summer.
Near this camp, just down Canal Road off Maple Grange Road, are several chert quarries on the Appalachian Trail. Chert is a stone used for making tools and projectile points. You can recognize it by the way it’s found sandwiched in layers with other rocks. Most of the chert I’ve seen around here is black, though it can be white, grey or even red.
High Breeze Farm on Barrett Road, off Route 94 at the Vernon-Warwick border, is a triple delight. It is the closest you can get to what a 19th century farm looked like because it was operated as one by Luther Barrett until 1986. Secondly, it is a living museum of Lenape artifacts and there’s a little pull-off on Barrett Road just above the farm, where you are treated to a wondrous view of the mountains north and west of here.
– Daniel Mack, Warwick
Dan invites you to share your thin place in the comments here.
If going into farming is financially risky, farming with beasts of burden might as well be Russian roulette.
“I wish I was doing something more secure, financially, especially when my body starts to hurt,” said Tom Paduano, a central character in a documentary about a new generation of farmers eschewing a century’s advances in agriculture in favor of horses and oxen. Call it an industrial de-evolution.
Paduano was plodding unhappily along as a computer systems engineer, when he took an 85 percent pay cut to become a farm intern. After he’d gotten his first taste of farming with Budweiser-esque draft horses, even Paduano’s dad, who doesn’t like horses, could see his son had found his calling.
The non-Mennonite farmers doing it the Amish way are small in number, mostly broke, and very tired. (A farmer walks nine miles behind his horse or oxen for every acre plowed.) Only about 12 farmers in the Garden State — whose farmland is the second most expensive in the country — use draft power.
But it’s a resolute bunch and they’re getting attention. The same day about 75 people gathered at Sussex County Community College for a screening of “The Farmer and the Horse,” the NY Times ran an article in its dining section: “On Small Farms, Hoof Power Returns.”
Paduano wants to save enough money to start his own horse-powered farm. “At first it will be hard, yeah, but it could be something that could eventually be easier, because it could be more beautiful than driving around on a tractor,” he said. He knows he’s romanticizing farming, and hell, why not? But he’s determined above all to make it work: if he can’t make ends meet, he’d rather farm with a tractor than not at all.
Farmers drawn to draft power tend to have a lot in common, including, as movie-goer Michael Bengis of Hopatcong pointed out in the Q&A, a penchant for facial hair. But when it comes to their motivations for making a hard life harder still, each of these farmers seems to be following a deeply ingrained, highly personal instinct.
Here’s a sampling: I don’t want my future to be dependent on my ability to buy fuel. You can become friends with a horse. People were happier when they lived a simpler lifestyle. Using God’s creatures is more in balance with creation. It’s more fun. There’s no exhaust or danger of oil or hydraulic fluid dripping into your soil or water supply. A tractor is a machine that takes labor away from people. You can hear the birds singing while you’re following the plow.
A farm intern who relocated to Jersey from the Adirondacks simply finds no appeal to farming with tractors. (“I don’t think he’s crazy,” said his wife, sounding like a similar but slightly milder adjective might suit.)
There are little bonuses, too, like being able to use animal poop as fertilizer, and plow the fields when they’re damp, which must have been particularly advantageous this rainy spring.
For Paduano, a man of few words, it’s hard to explain why he’s pursuing what might have been his great-great-grandfather’s occupation.
“It just feels right when everything’s clicking together,” he said, his eyes casting around. Then he looked straight at the camera. “When everything comes together on the farm, it feels good.”
The Farmer and the Horse
76 minutes; Directed by Jared Flesher
Next from Jared: Sourlands, about Jersey’s last great forest
The Angel family on the farm they own.
When two New York City teens decided to track their food to its source, they ended up in Goshen on a farm with a very New York sort of story.
Ana and Chrisostomo Angel came to the United States in the late 80s. They lived and brought up four kids in Brooklyn, and worked all sorts of jobs, including running a taco stand. Ana, who had grown up on a farm in her native Progreso, Mexico, harbored a dream of getting back to the land at some point, somehow. The Angels often drove past Goshen on their way to visit family in Middetown, and they knew the soil was “rico” – rich. But for all the access they had, it might as well have been a desert.
Then they saw an announcement on TV about The New Farmer Development Project, which helps immigrants with agricultural experience establish small farms. Ana was accepted to the program in 2004 and trained in organic techniques like planting beneficial inter-planting that keeps bugs at bay. (Ana grew up on an organic farm, although there was no such word in the local lexicon.) She got help procuring seeds, finding land and making connections.
Today, the family farms 17 acres of “rico” black dirt. On weekends, they drive up to the Angel Family Farm from Brooklyn to plant or pick produce – including some home-inspired favorites like poblano and jalapeno peppers and papalo, a relative of cilantro – which they sell at farmers’ markets in the city and distribute to the over 100 members of their community supported agriculture programs.
Other than their land, two trucks and a tractor, they don’t have much. But what use, Ana laughs, do farmers have for fancy clothes? Posts are in the ground for what they hope will be a storage shed, if the harvest is a good one. On farming weekend, the Angels stay with family in Middletown, and in return, their hosts are invited to roam free on the farm and pick to their hearts’ content.
Their appearance in the movie, “What’s on Your Plate,” has been good for the family. People recognize them now at farmers’ markets. But they’re still strangers in Goshen. Dirt got lost looking for the Angel Family Farm and inquired at the farm next door. The farmer had never heard of them.
Ana, 40, compares raising plants to something she has lots of experience with: raising children. You have to weed, she said, because a plant, like a child, will get lost if you let it associate with bad friends.
Chrisostomo, 41, who grew up in cities, was skeptical at first. Now, he’s a farmer through and through. “I don’t want any other work. There is much satisfaction and tranquility. No one bothers us anymore.”
When Ana picked her youngest daughter up at her Brooklyn school recently, the teacher told Ana that Maria, 5, had been telling beautiful stories from back home in Mexico. Since Maria has never been to Mexico, Ana wondered whether her daughter was making up stories.
It turns out Maria is just telling it like it is. “I’m telling all my friends that I’m a farmer,” she said, “but they don’t believe me! They think I’m crazy.”
Interested in Angel Farm CSA? Call Ana Angel: 347-236-5673
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