Category: Art & Theater

Ernest Thompson talks new novel at BNH Stage

Though he’s a multi-hyphenate — Oscar-winning screenwriter, playwright, filmmaker, actor, author and songwriter — Ernest Thompson is not a tech whiz. If he were, his second novel might have arrived sooner. The New England native, well-known for On Golden Pond, began writing it 13 years ago, saving work on thumb drives.

That choice, it turned out, was a big mistake that would force Thompson back to square one.

Just before he and his wife left on a vacation, he managed to overwrite a big file with a tiny one. “You’re talking to a guy who’s a Luddite from about 1882,” he said in a Zoom interview ahead of an appearance in Concord on Aug. 26. “I didn’t pick it up for another few months, and by the time I did … the first 150 pages of the novel were gone.”

He hadn’t known about the cloud — but there was a silver lining. A newly blank screen didn’t deter Thompson, who’d famously cranked out his Academy Award-winning screenplay in three days. And as time passed, the book’s premise of disappearing from a harsh reality grew more timely.

“I rewrote it so fast,” he said. “Then I got momentum … a different kind of speed.”

That said, the finished book is 545 pages. Its multiple characters include a wealthy businessman who fakes jumping off a bridge, the cop who doggedly tracks him after he vanishes, and the damaged visionary behind the organization who gives the book its title.

“There’s a lot of saga and epic,” Thompson said. “So no, I didn’t write it in a weekend.”

The idea for Out Clause, published in May, had circled him for years.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the notion of, what if we had a choice … a chance to live a different life?” Thompson said. The disappeared all must agree to be better, and more noble, in their second acts. “If you don’t, there are consequences,” he said. “Your body will be found close to where it went missing.” The operation is led by Oxton Paris, who began it because a disfiguring facial birthmark made him a social outcast. He moves to Evador, a fictional country near the equator, and becomes a spiritual guide for similarly broken people.

“I don’t know about you, but everybody I know has got some kind of challenge,” Thompson said. “Sometimes they’re dire and sometimes they’re simple … maybe even fixable. But the idea of, wow, what if we could just step away and start over again? It’s just stayed with me.”

At the upcoming BNH Stage event, sponsored by Gibson’s Bookstore, Thompson will have an onstage conversation with Rick Ganley of New Hampshire Public Radio. He’ll sign copies of both Out Clause and his first novel, The Book of Maps, afterward. As with all of his appearances, he’ll bring his golden statue for fans to hold or take a photo.

“I never leave home without the Oscar,” he told Arcadia Adventures recently. “It’s been handled by so many people that it’s tarnished already, but I love that because it gives people a moment to hold the thing and dream the dream of what would it be like.”

The new novel isn’t the only long-gestating work of his that’s current news. A Broadway revival of On Golden Pond with Thompson in the Henry Fonda role in is the works. On the musical side, a song he wrote is on Carly Simon’s first studio album in 17 years, Comes In Waves.

Simon recorded “The Father Daughter Dance” 15 years ago, after a childhood friend connected her to Thompson.

“It was the stuff of dreams for me,” Thompson said. Joined by his musical partner Joe Deleault and guitarist Randy Roos in a Lakes Region recording studio, it was an emotional session. “She lost her dad when she was 15, so I think the song got right into her gut … you can hear her voice crack, because she teared up singing it.”

Though the Grammy-winning Rock & Roll Hall of Famer asked to do another take, Thompson adamantly refused.

“I said that we’re not, because you couldn’t fake that. It’s so extraordinary how emotional she gets singing it.” Recently his music company wanted to release the promo-only song as a single, but they didn’t want to compete with Simon’s new LP. So Thompson called Simon, who’d all but forgotten about it, and asked him to send it to her.

“She said, ‘I know I’m going to hate it,’ because that’s Carly,” he recalled. “So I wrote her an email. I said, ‘Please be kind to the singer … I think it’s amazing what she sings.’ She listened to it and wrote back immediately. She said, ‘No kindness required, I love that song.’ That’s how it found its way onto the album.”

Authors on Main: Ernest Thompson
When: Wednesday, Aug. 26, 7 p.m.
Where: BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $30 includes copy of Out Clause, $15 admission only, ccanh.com

Featured photo: Ernest Thompson. Photo by Joe Klementovich.

Words inspire art at Kimball Jenkins

An upcoming exhibition at the Kimball Jenkins Estate will pair works of art with poetry but flip the traditional ekphrastic approach. Since time immemorial, poets have written about paintings, but “Dwelling Places” instead has painters responding to poems.

The effort, which opened Aug. 7, unites Kimball Jenkins-affiliated artists with a Concord-based poetry group.

The idea traces back to last year, when Kimball Jenkins Executive Director Martha Lemire attended the Percheron Poets’ annual Poetry & Pie event for the first time. “I was so inspired by the poets and their original writing,” she recalled. “I said, wouldn’t it be cool if next summer we did an exhibition around poetry, and have artists respond to your words?”

Art in Bloom, floral arrangements coupled with artwork, is a January tradition at Kimball Jenkins, and Lemire wondered if poets could inspire a mirror image of that. “We did it backwards,” she said. “I thought it would be an interesting concept to see what they could come up with.”

The Percheron Poets enthusiastically endorsed the idea.

The mechanics of the pairing varied. Some poets already had artist collaborators and had been working alongside them for months, while others didn’t. Lemire put roughly five or six unmatched poems out to the wider community of artists who exhibit at or teach for Kimball Jenkins, who then chose the ones that spoke to them.

The show’s evocative title came from the poets themselves. “This is your show,” Lemire told them. “We were hoping to have the poems shine in this whole collaborative exhibition that we’re doing together. So I gave them the opportunity to come up with their title, and they did.”

In a Zoom call, Percheron Poets member Brenda Wilbert explained the title’s meaning.

“It reflects a positive feeling associated with writing from the seat of one’s own heart and mind — the inner life where the soul dwells,” she said. “Dwelling places are bright enough to encompass the poems and artwork. It’s a fun way of thinking of them dwelling for a while in the old, elegant mansion.”

Wilbert is also an artist, one of the exhibition’s many hyphenates. She works in wearable and digital art, built around her Heart Full of Color unisex clothing collection. One of her pieces was recently featured in a Montreal Clothing Co. marketing campaign. She recently had a solo show of her artwork at Kimball Jenkins.

“I was so blessed and honored,” she said of the five-week exhibition of her paintings alongside a room of mannequins dressed in her clothing line, including one posed at a piano. Wilbert is also a playwright and once ran her own theater company, following in the footsteps of her late husband, also a playwright.

For “Dwelling Places,” Wilbert contributed two poems. She created the artwork for one herself. For the other, “How They Grew,” about her father’s tomatoes, she recruited Susan Huppe, a retired art teacher. “Susan doesn’t really show her work, and now I encouraged her to do it,” she said. Huppe’s painting is being used to promote the exhibition.

The Percheron Poets origin story traces back to a workshop Adele Sanborn ran in Boscawen at the now-shuttered Twiggs Gallery. “Right outside Twiggs, there were Percheron horses,” Wilbert said. “We were looking at the horses when we’re in this meeting, and this is how it all started.” The group has met monthly ever since.

Wilbert spent her earlier career in mental health services. She’s written often about grief but came to poetry late in life.

“I decided I wanted to do it,” she said, pointing out an overlap between that kind of writing and visual art. “Writing poetry or expressing art is often very healing.”

What is Wilbert most looking forward to at the event? “People being present with both the poems and artwork,” she said simply. “Like to really go through them, the mansion, and just sit with us. Really look at the poem, read the poem, look at the artwork, and just be present there.”

She’s also eager for another year of the gathering that inspired “Dwelling Places.” However, she’s quick to clarify one thing: for Poetry & Pie on Aug. 23, Wilbert will only read — she does not bake. “I’m not a cook, forget it,” she said. “I go to the Co-Op; I get a lot of great pies over there.”

Art & Poetry: Dwelling Places
Where: Kimball Jenkins Estate, 266 N. Main St., Concord
When: Through Saturday, Sept. 5, various days and hours. Public opening reception Aug. 13, 5:30-7:30 p.m. in the Kimball Jenkins Mansion.
More: kimballjenkins.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Making peace, and art, with AI

When Elsie Kagan talks about painting, it sounds like a jazz player’s memory of hearing a standard for the first time.

“I’m full of influences from other artists and from the history of the medium I work in,” she said by phone from Chicago, mid-residency with the artist collective Tiger Strikes Asteroid. “So I don’t feel like I take full ownership for whatever I’m making. There’s this kind of porous relationship I have to all of my resources and influences.”

That porousness now includes a surprising collaborator: generative AI. Kagan’s solo exhibition, “the drop falls,” opens Aug. 7 at 3S Artspace in Portsmouth. The next day, she’ll demonstrate her process, which includes using an agent to transform her paintings, then join her husband, Carl Robichaud, for a public conversation about art and machine intelligence.

Robichaud has spent 25 years working on nuclear risk and now leads AI-related grantmaking at Longview Philanthropy, an organization Kagan describes as “concerned with the long-term protection of humanity.” Longview, she continued, considers AI “a real threat to our future.”

Paradoxically, this belief led Kagan to first engage with AI in her painting.

Such alarmism “was so difficult to wrap my imagination around,” she said. Then she realized there are visual AI models as well. “So I started to bring AI into the studio, thinking that it would be a very alien experience, but I actually had a kind of opposite reaction to them.”

Specifically, she found the models’ human-like characteristics soothing.

“The way that they operate visually seemed to kind of rhyme with what I’m interested in as a painter,” she said. “There are these visual cues they come up with as a response to prompts, but there are all these glitches, confusions and inventions … you’re sort of fighting between an experience of illusion and creating space and story and depth.”

Her method is simple to describe and harder to categorize. She paints, photographs the painting, feeds the image into an AI model, and lets whatever comes back seed the next canvas. Early on, she said, a model would take an unadorned photo of her canvas and abstract it, unprompted.

“It had kind of an innate understanding of my visual vocabulary as painting,” she said, calling the discovery “an absolute delight.” Crucially, she resists the idea that this is fundamentally different from how she’s always worked.

“It seemed very natural to kind of move from art historical references to AI,” she said, “because what is this AI? It’s just a kind of card catalog of all of our own making. It is us.” But she’s also watched the tool change under her, and not for the better, in her telling.

Outputs that once felt rough and painterly now come back “smoothed out,” closer to what she calls “faux reality” than to the glitchy abstraction she originally found useful. An early transformation of an impressionistic pool of water she called “long time gone” felt natural, while a later one seemed a bit Thomas Kinkade-y.

The model seemed to be correcting her, she said. “It’s decided that you’re a little too abstract here.”

The different systems she’s used have also converged in behavior: “They all used to kind of have their own characteristics and impulses, and they all behave more similarly now,” she believes. That convergence is a sign of where the technology’s heading. “Out into the stratosphere on its own, and kind of away from our own control and humanness.”

She’s aware this doesn’t square easily with the climate concerns running through some of her paintings, or the resource costs of massive data centers powering the models she uses.

“There’s no real good answers to any of this,” she said. “It’s coming for us, good and for bad. We should try to engage with it just as a human who’s experiencing the world as it is.”

That tension of engagement without illusion is likely to be present during the conversation with Robichaud, whom Kagan describes as her temperamental opposite on the subject. He evaluates AI risk “from a very high bird’s-eye point,” she said, mindful of its threat but having “an ability to sort of remove an anxious emotional reaction to the moment.”

Kagan calls herself granular and anxious by comparison. On stage, she plans to do something the gallery walls don’t: show her source material directly; “pull the curtain back” on which paintings prompted which AI responses, and introduce other artists grappling with the same tools — many of whom want nothing to do with it.

“A lot of my painter peers,” she said, “won’t touch this stuff with a 10-foot pole.

In the Meantime: Art Making Alongside Machine Intelligence – Artist Talk with Elsie Kagan + Carl Robichaud
When: Saturday, Aug. 8, 1 p.m. presentation, 2 p.m. conversation
Where: 3S Artspace, 319 Vaughan St., Portsmouth
Tickets: Free (Suggested donation $5), reserve spot at eventbrite.com
Elsie Kagan exhibit, ‘the drop falls,’ runs through Sept. 27 alongside Mina Kim’s exhibit, Between Lines and Breath

Featured photo: “long time gone” by Elsie Kagan (at left) and the AI interpretation of the work (at right). Courtesy images.

Buy some works, meet the artists in Goffstown

By Chelsea Spear
listings@hippopress.com

Uncommon Arts on the Common, the 16th annual arts and crafts festival organized by Goffstown Main Streets, lets attendees purchase art directly from artisans who live in the Goffstown area.

“Goffstown’s just a really strong community, people with a lot of different interests, and I think the art reflects that, especially with what you’d see on Art on the Common,” Chloe DuBois, who serves on the board of Goffstown Main Streets, said in a Zoom interview. “You have crafters, you have people who upcycle, painters, painting a variety of subjects, but you kind of really see a breadth of everyone’s interests and their connection to their community through their art.”

Uncommon Arts on the Common was founded in 2009 by Goffstown Main Street, an organization that “helps with programming around Goffstown’s Main Street Village from events, public art,” DuBois said.

Because these events are primarily volunteer-run, they “rotate whoever’s involved with the organization, an event comes up and we get together and make it happen,” DuBois said. This year, the volunteers honed their focus on the artisans and craftspeople of the Goffstown area.

MJ Depictions will be selling photo prints at Art on the Common, and photographer Bonnie Grower will also be on hand with prints of her pet photography. Those in the market for what DuBois describes as “more practical” arts will want to check out Diana Plank, who sells elegant ceramic trays and drink coasters with citrus designs. YarnMeThings will be selling hand-crocheted plushies. Style mavens will want to check out Luna Rose and Clay and Cotton, two retailers that sell vintage clothing, and accessorize their new outfits with jewelry from Meadow Rose or Ear 2 Ear Jewelry.

While the event is keeping a tight focus on handmade arts, DuBois mentioned that Uncommon Arts would also be hosting some demonstrations, such as “live painting in front of the crowd so people can go up and ask questions.” She also singled out blacksmith Jay Davini as a vendor whose work she regards as “super cool.”

“Uncommon Art is really here to support or celebrate is livening up the village in the middle of the summer in between a season of things going on and celebrating using artists, local artists and crafters to liven it up and really support the businesses,” DuBois said. “It’s a really fun time if you want to just get out and see what your neighbors have been up to.”

Uncommon Arts on the Common
When: Saturday, Aug. 1, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Where: Main Street in the Village of Goffstown, see the website for a map
More info: goffstownmainstreet.org

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.