Artisans: Patterns & Rhythms

For Northeast Kingdom artist Mary Simpson, there’s a quiet magic to rural life

By Tom Slayton

Mary Simpson’s prints reflect her upbringing on a dairy farm in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. “Growing up on a farm, enjoying animals and valuing purposeful, rural work gave me good, interesting memories,” she said recently. “Since being back in Vermont, I have rediscovered things to say.”

Now living in Lyndonville, Simpson, 62, was born in northern Vermont and raised on a working dairy farm in Burke. After graduating from Lyndon State College, she and her husband, Wilder Simpson, taught school in the area for several years, then moved west. They lived for seven years in Wyoming and 14 years in Alaska, returning to Vermont in 1992. “My artistic development has been a slow go,” Simpson notes. She has worked at developing her style for more than 20 years.

While raising her three children, Simpson took art classes and worked on her own in various media — drawing, calligraphy and painting — honing her skills. In Alaska, she worked as a graphic artist for the Imaginarium Science Center in Anchorage and as a scenic artist for the Alaska Festival Theatre and Anchorage Civic Opera. She did scrimshaw (engraving on ivory) for two shops and exhibit calligraphy for three years for the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. She now finds printmaking the most satisfying medium in expressing her memories of farm and rural life.

Simpson’s work is easily accessible, but evokes a variety of deeper meanings as well. Her subject matter is farm activities: tending cows, logging, sugaring, daily chores, nature and the round of the seasons. She uses pattern and a variety of visual rhythms to suggest that there is order and a quiet magic underlying the daily details of rural life. Her skies often are patterned to suggest depth and meaning.

There is humor in some of her work, as in “Ode to My Corn,” in which crows consume her carefully planted corn kernels. She consistently suggests the importance of women on the farm, both as equal laborers — they work alongside men in many of her images — and as bearers of tradition and knowledge. In the print, “Legacy,” apple-paring symbolizes a wide range of skills passed down the generations, woman to woman.

“My father was a storyteller,” she says. “I realize my artwork does the same thing.”

Simpson says she is grateful for “my peaceful, nurturing childhood, which was about family and work.”

Perhaps it is no surprise that both are major themes in her prints.

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Mary Simpson’s prints are available at these locations:

• Frog Hollow Vermont State Craft Centers in Burlington, 85 Church St., (802) 863-6458
• Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury, 88 Main St., (802) 388-4964
• Artisan’s Hand in Montpelier, 89 Main St., (802) 229-9492
• Northeast Kingdom Artisans Guild in St. Johnsbury, 430 Railroad St., (802) 748-0158