By GARRY RAYNO, Distant Dome
“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
—Pablo Picasso
If you have seen Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Mona Lisa in the Louvre, your first impression is how small it is, but as your eyes look over the entire painting you see the delicate brush strokes and you don’t quite know if that is a smile on her lips.
And then she appears to be looking at you as you look at her.
The painting was done more than 500 years ago, yet it continues to attract crowds of art lovers, and tourists, art historians and artists to the museum in Paris.
Transfixed by the painting, the dust of everyday life can wait another day.
While Picasso did not actually say the quote he is often credited for, it suggests art inspires the imagination, renews the soul and deepens our connection to the world.
In our little piece of the world here in New Hampshire, our mountains have inspired countless paintings, as have our lakes, our seacoast and our factories lining the Merrimack River in Manchester.
The state has been a home to many world renown artists from the White Mountain school of painters to the rock band Aerosmith and the poet Robert Frost.
“On Golden Pond” was filmed in New Hampshire and famous musicians ply their craft on the Bank of New Hampshire Pavilion in Gilford and the theaters of Manchester, the Hampton Beach Casino, the Music Hall in Portsmouth, the Flying Monkey in Plymouth, the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord, and numerous stages at the state’s colleges and universities.
New Hampshire is also home to many summer theaters, several are some of the oldest and longest running in the country like the Barn Playhouse in New London, and Barnstormers Theatre in Tamworth.
New Hampshire is also home to the Saint Gaudens National Historical Park in Cornish where the world renowned sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens worked and lived.
And Peterborough is home to the revered MacDowell Colony named after the country’s first great composer James MacDowell, who summered there on a farm he and his wife purchased.
He said he composed more and better music in the quiet and peaceful atmosphere and wanted other artists to have the same creative experience.
The retreat has 32 cottages for artists to live in and create that have been summer residences to artists like James Baldwin, Leonard Bernstein, Katherine Min, John Updike, Georgia O’Keeffe, IM Pei and Rosanne Cash.
Peterborough is the model for Thorton Wilder’s play “Our Town,” and was the home of the Folkway, a restaurant and performance hall that hosted the biggest names in folk music until it closed a couple of decades ago.
New Hampshire has been home to a plethora of writers and appears in the writings of Henry David Thoreau. More recently New Hampshire was home to poets Robert Frost, Don Hall, Jane Kenyon, EE Cummings, Charles Simic, Wesley McNair and Elizabeth Yates;
Novelists Tom Williams, John Irving, Dan Brown, Jodi Picoult, J.D. Salinger, Ernest Hebert, Ann Williams and Russell Banks.
New Hampshire was also home to Sarah Josepha Hale who is known for the poem “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” but established herself as a serious writer with her novel “Northwood, a Tale of New England,” and was editor of Ladies Magazine.
She is also credited with convincing Abraham Lincoln to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday.
Several writers taught at the University of New Hampshire, which faces a $50 million cut in state aid in the proposed operating budget, including Tom and Ann Williams, Simic and Banks.
Hall and Kenyon were named Poet Laureates of New Hampshire, and Hall and Simic were national Poet Laureates, while McNair served two terms as Maine’s Poet Laureate after he was enticed to teach at a better-funded University of Maine. McNair was born in New Hampshire, graduated from Keene State College and taught at Colby-Sawyer College for a number of years.
Numerous world famous musicians have called or call The Granite State home, perhaps the most famous, Aerosmith, the rock band known as the Bad Boys from Boston. Before that they were the Bad Boys from The Barn, a summer place for mostly aspiring rock bands to cut their teeth and teenagers to get their first taste of pot.
Combining the groups Chain Reaction and The Jam Band, Aerosmith was born and would go on to be one of America’s most successful rock bands.
Tommy Makem was as well known in Europe as he was in his hometown of Dover, where some of his relatives had moved from Ireland to work in the textile mills before they closed.
New Hampshire native Tom Rush was one of the early participants in the Boston folk music revival of the early 1960s that also produced Joan Baez, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band which includes Geoff and Maria Muldaur, and Bill Keith, and Eric Von Schmidt, who for years owned a summer home in Henniker.
There were also others who had national followings who called New Hampshire home including Bill Staines, Bill Morrissey, Cormac McCarthy, Dan Zanes and Mandy Moore., along with actor and singer Adam Sandler.
And going back in time, the Hutchinson Family Singers were well known as were the Hillside Singers which include Rick and Ron Shaw who were born in West Stewartstown. At UNH they were members of the Brandywine Singers and later the Hillside Singers with the 1960s hit “I’d Like to Teach the World To Sing.”
The arts also includes the annual Craftsmen’s Fair held at Mount Sunapee State Park that draws thousands of people to New Hampshire during the first two weeks of August with well known potters, leather workers, and furniture and candle makers, as well as painters, sculptors and other artists.
The musical and theatrical arts also draw thousands of people to the state in large performing spaces such as the Bank of New Hampshire Pavilion, The Palace Theatre, the Capitol Center for the Arts, Hampton Beach Casino and numerous theaters at college campuses throughout the state.
That brings in tax dollars to the state in the millions and millions of dollars and the Legislature can only find one measly dollar to fund the arts in New Hampshire.
If that stands, New Hampshire will be the only state in the union to not support the arts. That means every other state supports the arts more than New Hampshire, but that is not a negative for some because the Granite State is dead last in support for public education in the country and also holds that same spot for higher education.
The problem with not funding the arts for one budget is that it will be extremely difficult to find money in the future, particularly if the same crew is in charge that only answers the call if it involves drugs, alcohol or guns, or to destroy or do away with a long-standing institution.
The idea to do away with the $500,000 annual appropriation for the arts came from House Deputy Majority Leader Joe Sweeney of Salem as an amendment when a House Finance subcommittee worked on its version of the budget.
His amendment not only did away with the State Council on the Arts, it also defunded the State Library and its work.
New Hampshire could have been the only state in the union not supporting the arts and not supporting literacy, but one Republican member of the subcommittee refused to support eliminating the State Library and it stayed in the budget.
In today’s current anti-intellectual culture, it is good to remember what noted English writer Samuel Johnson, who created the world’s first dictionary, told his Scottish biographer James Boswell, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”
To paraphrase a little, “When a man is tired of art, he is tired of life.”
And without art, the dust of daily life will pile up around the soul and a person will suffocate.
Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.
Distant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn in New London.