What inspires the artists of Valley Artisans Market and where do they find the raw materials to create unique works of art? The answers are as diverse as the artists’ mediums, which include painting, photography, ceramics, fabric and felt art, wood, wood carving, stained glass, mosaics, cardmaking, pysanky, needlepoint embroidery, jewelry, basketry, and weaving.

Martha Starke of Saratoga Springs, NY is inspired by her extensive garden of flowers and herbs, which she picks and dries to design her whimsical note cards. What’s terribly challenging, she says, is hot summers like last year. “The humidity means I can’t press flowers because that extra moisture will turn them brown in the presses.” She needs dry, cool days for optimal pressing, but these have been rare in the last couple of years. Every year, she tries to introduce new botanicals into her creations, looking for fresh colors and shapes. She was excited to find a new flower, abutilon (flowering maple), that was blooming steadily in her garden with a rich coral color. But all of the specimens she pressed turned brown. She explains that some flowers, such as yellow ones, don’t reliably hold their color; Botanicals that are red tend to turn darker when pressed, while blue and purple ones are the most reliable. This unsuccessful attempt did goad her to search for new plants to add to her garden. She’s been known to come home with a carload of new plants, which, she reminds her husband, are tax-deductible.

Martha prizes good old-fashioned pansies. “They can be tricky to work with because gluing them down is akin to working with Saran Wrap.” Other favorites are Verbena because it always presses well and keeps its color, while Queen Anne’s Lace is easy to work with and offers many options for use, she says. And herbs press well and can offer many uses, including representing hair or limbs. “Plus, I can cook with them!”

Bliss McIntosh of Cambridge, NY has long sourced the black ash for her baskets from local swampy woods. “Last summer the only ones I could find were already dead from the emerald ash borer,” she recounts. This may mean that it won’t be possible for her to make baskets after she depletes her current supply of ash. She does, however, sometimes use the inner bark of elm or hickory. She uses white ash and occasionally hickory to split, carve and bend for the rims and handles of her baskets.

Her birch supply comes from various places, including from a forester friend in New Hampshire who has helped her source good bark from trees he is marking for harvest. Usually, it must be taken during a month-long window between mid-June and mid-July. She harvests spruce roots from places where spruce trees grow very closely together, like on a plantation of spruce.
Bliss collects corn husks for her hand-fashioned dolls after a hard frost. “My favorites are from popcorn as they are thinner and more flexible,” she says “I save the dried corn silk at the same time to use for hair.” She makes the “horns” from a gall that develops around a fly larva on the stems of goldenrod, and the milkweed pods must be harvested after the pods have opened and scattered their fluff.
Jean Clark, a painter, buys most of her supplies online. She uses a print supply store called Renaissance for her plexiglass, printing mediums, and beautiful papers. She buys her Holbein watercolor tubes from Blick.

Mary Lou Strode, also a painter, was captivated so much by a bird’s nest she found that she sewed it to her painting of the world titled, “Home Sweet Home.”

Carolyn Kibbe, a painter, generally paints from photographs, and takes most of the photos herself then prints them on regular paper. She sources most canvas rolls, stretcher strips, paints, brushes, odorless thinner, and equipment like easels and stretching tools from Jerrysartarama. Jerry’s carries most all paint brands. Ace Hardware in Cambridge has all the hanging materials. She also buys paints online from Blue Ridge. Locally, she finds Soave Faire, in Saratoga Springs, excellent for pre-stretched canvases, small items of framing hardware, spray varnish, and an occasional frame. “I always check out [VAM member] Chris Levy’s Green Arts website, too!”

Lise Winne paints from photographs and her imagination to make fantasy art, or work that has some meaning or symbolic message. She sometimes uses the computer to play around with a drawing for a design. Or she’ll use it for a whole work of art with an original drawing scanned in and colorized in the computer (only good for prints and cards unless she is doing one print without any duplicates that she can then call an original).

Her bouquet series (cards that use images of real flowers and leaves) is a combination of photoshop plus photographs. “I wipe out the background,” she explains, “so that I primarily end up with white behind each bouquet. I usually put an obnoxiously bright pink behind each bouquet to start as it is an opposite color and easier to see for the ‘wipe out” process’. Each bouquet takes a week or two of full-time work to finish.

Lise gets her painting supplies from Dick Blick and Soave Faire. She also likes Michael’s twice-yearly sales. Michael’s sells archival glass which is what she always uses for her works on paper, especially anything with watercolors or ink, to prevent fading.

Textile artist Kris Moss finds interesting items everywhere: “About the house, outside the house, and on our trips to 49 states and nearly all of the Canadian provinces,” she says. “Generally, these things are sticks and stones and shells, but not limited to such. Then there are photos in my head of all the places I have seen. I have even been blessed with gifts from others: a neighbor whose illness prevented her from utilizing her stash, parents of a young lady whose glaucoma was preventing her from continuing her needlepoint, scrapes from quilting friends, sticks and burls from my brother who creates gorgeous Adirondack furniture and one of my newest joys…the leftover warp threads from a weaving friend. Then, of course, I have grown fond of bead embroidery, basketry, and weaving… It seems I started just sewing but now I see ‘things’ in my fabrics that want to play with everything else I have collected and most likely I have become mixed media!”

Some VAM artists have formal art training while others are completely self taught. And some makers joined VAM decades ago as novices and have grown into their art. Would you like to join our family of makers? Please see our website for an application. Or come in any time to shop or browse. We love to talk about our art!