Photograph by Nancie Battaglia
“Something wonderful is happening here. The world is being changed,” Edward “Ted” Cornell says. The artist is talking trash: not in-your-face dissing, and not the stuff of yard sales, but the junk unworthy even of dragging to the dump. He’s talking wretched refuse dredged from the water during the Boquet River Association (BRASS) annual spring cleanup day Trashy Sculpture Contest. The half-ton of debris volunteers collect is shocking, but they create wonders from the cast-off objets d’art.
Who better to judge the temporary sculptures than Cornell, a painter and sculptor who delights in what he calls “minimally processed found objects.” Before awarding prizes, at the Hale House, in Elizabethtown, he describes the history of junk sculpture, which arose from San Francisco’s beatnik era.
The sixty-two-year-old knows from experience what he’s talking about. Anyone who has driven through Wadhams along Sayre Road the past half-dozen years must have noticed what appears to be a slowly rotating beached whale or UFO. Most passersby call it simply Champ. Just as the beast is said to rise from the waters of Lake Champlain to the disbelief of onlookers, Cornell’s sculpture rises from the field. It appears to undulate as it spins. Champ the monster might not sigh or sound like a dying bagpipe, but the sculpture does. On close inspection it is quite obviously a collapsed metal silo mounted on a pylon.
Look even closer and Cornell’s Crooked Brook Art Farm takes shape: 140 acres of field and forest, two ponds fed by Crooked Brook on its circuitous route to the Boquet, a barn studio, plus dams and creek crossings made of radiators and other found objects; they resemble pyramids when covered with snow, muskrat homes in other seasons. A cone-shaped pile of stones actually floats in one of the ponds. In a painting shed not much larger than a hunting blind, Cornell can look out a window for his elusive prey: the light that makes the same view fluctuate, a la Monet. The ponds, created as part of a 1995 federal Fish and Wildlife Service wetland restoration project, are habitat for waterfowl and myriad other creatures—where better than an art farm to find a painted turtle?
Cornell came to the North Country 16 years ago, when an unexpected inheritance from a great-aunt he’d never met offered him the opportunity to give up what he knew in order to learn something else. After a degree in philosophy from Williams College, Cornell embarked on a New York City theatrical career that began as an assistant to the New York Shakespeare Festival’s legendary Joseph Papp. He moved into directing with such success that one play, No Place to Be Somebody, by Charles Cordone, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970. Cornell himself won an Obie (off-Broadway theater award) for direction of a revival of Johnny on a Spot, by Charles MacArthur, in 1980.
Following stints as a teacher, taxi driver and railway brakeman, and after organizing a rent strike and working as an investment banker with an office in the World Trade Center, Cornell left the city after 30 years. He took Amtrak north because the shores of Lake Champlain had caught his eye during trips all over the country in search of the perfect nesting spot.
He taught himself painting, and his canvases, mostly realistic landscapes rendered in oil, are now on permanent exhibit at the Essex Town Hall and Westport’s Depot Theatre (they can also be seen at his website, www.crookedbrookstudios.com). He acted in Depot Theatre productions and served on the theater’s board; presided over the Essex Planning Board during the formation of a comprehensive plan and zoning ordinance; became president of the Wadhams Free Library board of trustees and a director of BRASS; and helped create the Diogenes Society, a nonpartisan North Country advocacy group for honesty in public discourse. Cornell has been part of an effort to promote organic farming in the Champlain Valley. Also, he once took time to trap, spay and neuter a dozen feral cats before returning them to their colony.
He attends the Wednesdays at Wadhams lecture program he started at the library and also reads to children there and at Westport Central School. He takes as much pleasure from these activities as he does from being at home, surrounded by his art.
Following Cornell through his studio chores is like watching a four-year-old boy with a tool bench: his methodical precision is balanced by an exuberance for as yet unrealized creations. A map of his farm shows a three-mile trail around the ponds and sculptures as well as locations for future installations.
The studio off his kitchen was originally a woodshed. To improve insulation and light, Cornell renovated the farmhouse, which began as a simple structure in 1910 and grew gradually over the years. It retains its old-time feeling and houses a gallery.
In the studio, Cornell considers his latest projects. The magic wands he paints with are not so magical they do not need attention. Once a week he rinses his brushes, scrapes spatulas and recycles a turpentine bath through a Rube Goldberg series of kinetic bowls. He works with several brush sizes, as many as six per size, some for dark colors and some for light. He buys art supplies every couple of months during visits to New York City to see his sons, Noah and Ethan.
On a wintry day at Betty Beaver’s, a truck stop at a Northway exit in Lewis, Cornell orders a bone-warming meal of chicken and biscuits before settling back to view the snowy scene out the window.
He has not only dived in to community life in the North Country, he often ponders its future and the well-being of its residents. “What do you see happening to this area in the next 30 years?” he asks. “How do you see it changing? There’s an opportunity for young people in the cyber age to remain here, where they are allowed to be eager and talented but minus the egos of mainstream urban centers,” Cornell says.
He would like two stereotypes of rural life dispensed with: the first is that with isolation comes loneliness; the second is that someone “escapes” from the city. ”Artists, whether working with space or color or words or music, find energy through solitude,” he says. “I left the city to do something new. I came for the solitude and stayed for the irony.”
Cornell describes an Adirondack chair he made for an exhibit a few years ago. He called it Chairish Wilderness: A Chair with a Message. The message, tucked into a box in the back: “If you want to reintroduce the wolves, strengthen the towns.”
A recent drive by Crooked Brook Art Farm shows Champ now dwarfed beside It So Happens. But it didn’t just happen. The 22-foot-tall arrangement took months of planning plus a skilled assistant, Ray Matteau, of Wadhams, to help with a tractor and scaffolding. Besides metal, rock and gold leaf, it contains fencing, copper pipe, hose and farm equipment such as a cart chassis with metal wheels, and the internal spine and chute of a silo, among other things. Here is philosophy in solid form, the culmination of a man’s thoughts and actions.
Cornell was right: something wonderful is happening in the North Country, just as it did at the BRASS cleanup day. Our world is being changed, our horizons expanded.
UPDATE: The 0.75-mile trail Art Farm Trail was added to the Champlain Area Trails (CATS) network in 2016, but many of the sculptures scattered on former pasturelands outside Wadhams have been here for decades. Artist Ted Cornell’s monumental assemblages of farm implements, scrap metal and other found objects have names like Mortgage Crisis, constructed out of a satellite dish and a hot tub, and A Rotating Installation of a Minimally Processed Found Object, made from a neighbor’s old silo dome. Continuing from the Art Farm, the trail leads into the woods before reemerging at a wetland and then connecting with the Field and Forest trail. Turn back the way you came for a 1.5-mile round trip. Directions: The trailhead is on Sayre Road, 0.6 mile north of Lewis-Wadhams Road. Learn more at www.champlainareatrails.com.
