Fifty years ago I won a blue ribbon in the Brattleboro Sidewalk Art Show. Thirty years ago I won a National Endowment for the Arts award for designing a local amphitheatre. This week I received a Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council. Some might say, the awards in my artistic career have been few and far between. I believe their rarity makes them all the more precious. Being recognized by my beloved green mountain state is especially dear.

Creation Grants support the making of new work by Vermont artists. Projects must have a strong potential for public presentation and stimulate greater public understanding of the respective art form. Creation Grants can fund time, materials, equipment rental, space rental required for the creation, and/or completion of original work. Each of the eleven recipients for 2015 receive $3,000.

The environmental art piece I will make, funded in part by the arts council grant, will be in an exhibition at Shelburne Museum, titled “Eyes on the Land”. The show, opening October 2015, is a partnership between the Vermont Land Trust, artists, and landowners that will explore how our landscape can be viewed and experienced through a variety of lenses. Twelve artists, as well as writers and oral historians, will be connected with conserved properties that represent the breadth of the Land Trust’s work: diversified farms, working forests, river ways and public access projects. It’s exciting for me to begin this artistic journey. The Mettawee River valley, between Pawlet and Wells, is the area I’m partnered with. From Dummerston to Pawlet to Shelburne, my activities will cover a broad swath of Vermont. Many thanks to the Vermont Arts Council for choosing me to receive a Creation Grant, and for all the good work they do to help keep the arts fresh and alive all around the state.

Stone Clouds is funded, in part, by a grant from the Vermont Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.