Tranquil Vermont is crisp and soft at the same time

Tranquil Vermont, by Gaal Shepherd, published in 2000 by Thistle Hill Publications of North Pomfret, Vermont, 48 pages, hardcover, $35

reviewed by Jennifer Hersey

"For many of us who live here, Vermont is not a preserve. But it is a place which has made its choices wisely. It has balanced growth with preservation."

Tranquil Vermont is composed of Gaal Shepherd’s paintings, pastels, and essays. In her introduction, Ms. Shepherd talks about traveling to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to get the inspiration needed to write her book. She describes driving past chain stores, fast food outlets, cell towers, and strip malls across a landscape that was "winter-bleak but snowless."

She said that during her trip west she saw "plenty of pavement and precious little to differentiate one spot from the next."

Ms. Shepherd’s book is divine. She paints with clarity yet whimsical softness. One critic said her paintings were nostalgic, like she was painting scenes that exist only in memories.

"For me they are anything but nostalgic.... I see what I paint every day on the way to the dentist, the gym, the grocery store."

To this critic, the paintings are very much based in reality, but then, I live here. Like Ms. Shepherd, those of us in the Kingdom don’t need to vacation to find solace in nature. We don’t drive to get to the woods or to a lake. The landscapes in Ms. Shepherd’s artwork will seem quite familiar to us.

Familiar like the jagged rocks softly tucked into eddies on the shiny, moving Ottauquechee River. And familiar like the stark birches jutting gracefully from snow with a few leaves, rusty-brown at wintertime, still clutching the trunk that will no longer give them life.

"My start on a landscape always entails a talk with myself, such as, ‘Egad, where do I start? It’s so complex. It’s too vivid for me to convey,’" she writes.

Perhaps this appreciation of the complexity of nature is why Ms. Shepherd is able to give us a walk through the woods. Perhaps this is why I almost can hear the faint crunch of snow and the clanging of branches in the wind. What is truly amazing is the way Ms. Shepherd is able to convey crispness and softness simultaneously, like it exists in nature.

Some who do not live here might look at the paintings and, like the critic, think they are just too beautiful to be of real places. "When I visually edit a scene, it’s always to take a bit of the magnificence away because I often think it might seem unreal if I painted it as splendid as it really is."

She speaks about her love of the community of Vermont and how people are more trusting, more willing to help a neighbor, and less pretentious. She tells a story to illustrate this. She and her father were parked at a stop sign in Woodstock when they saw a man in overalls and a straw hat. She asks her dad what he thinks the man does for a living.

"‘Well, I guess he’s a farmer,’ my father said."

"‘Some of the time he is,’ I explained, ‘but most of the time he’s a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.’"

She writes of the sacrifices people make to live in such a wonderful place — cold winters, few jobs, and low pay.

"But personally I’d pay just about any price to live in tranquil Vermont. We still wave at each other when we pass on the road," she writes.

Ms. Shepherd’s pastels are lovely. She manages to get vivid color and intense detail in one piece, a tough task for anyone. She writes about the sensuality and easiness of pastels, the way they glide and blend, how some are chalky and some are oily, and how some are fist-sized and some are tiny nubs.

In "Plum Wood," a snow-covered roof peeks from behind a meadow shattered by long shadows of leafless trees. In "Afternoon Woods," the light filtered through branches dapples the snow beneath. The path she paints is open and ready for adventuresome snowshoers to plunge.

She writes that her work has been called somber. I disagree. In each work there is an appropriate balance of darkness and lightness. Again, maybe it has been some time since that critic has been immersed in nature. Those of us here know just how dark the woods really are before strolling into a sunlit meadow full of buttercups.