Illustration of Main St. Stowe, Vermont by Carol Skinger
I am so pleased to do my part in helping out with the Cochran Ski Area End of the Year Celebration and Silent Auction!! It is happening this weekend Saturday April 6th, 2013 5-9pm at the Monitor Barn, Rt 2, Richmond, VT Cost: $35 per adult and $15 per child. I am donating a print of my ink drawing above of Stowe’s Main Street.
After the auction is done, if anyone wants another print of this drawing I have a number of them. Contact me through my contact form and we can work something out. Print on bond paper is 12″ w. x 7 1/2″ h. and I also have cards of it 8 1/2″ x 5 1/2″.
Remembering many great years of both my sister Erica and I racing with the Cochrans, I am donating this print of one of my early silly ink drawings of Main Street in Stowe, VT(1979) to the auction.
The family group I drew at lower right is supposed to be my mother and me, Erica and Jody. I hope this print adds a few dollars to the Cochran Ski Area fundraiser! If you are in VT, I hope you will go and bid high, bid often! Have FUN! Good luck with your event Lindy, Barbara, Bob, Marilyn and families! Wish I could be there.
I realize folks who do not know about Cochran’s Ski Area may think of it as a big commercial operation which it is not. You can read more about it on their website but it is the nation’s first non-profit 501 (c)(3) ski area and was established to continue the legacy of providing access to healthy winter recreation for local children and families. Since that time, their unique organization has been an overwhelming success in bringing together community resources to serve over 500 area school children each year as well as delivering outdoor educational programming to groups ranging from the Abenaki of Vermont to underprivileged children visiting from New York City. VT is famous for skiing, yet there are very many people in VT who can not afford to ski. Their area brings a sense of the early years of skiing when things were much, much simpler. Fundraising is necessary to keep it going as the entire experience they offer is kept to a very affordable level.
My interest in ink drawing started with a couple of informal sessions with Stowe commercial artist Alice Blodgett when I was in elementary school. Alice was the wife of well known watercolor painter Wally Blodgett, whose paintings can be seen on the Green Mountain Inn site. They were my first idea of artists who drew and painted. My father was a craftsman and sculptor, but the Blodgett’s pens, pencils and paint brushes interested me very much.
Alice sketched our home (which does not exist anymore) and interior for a brochure she created for my parent’s ski lodge in Stowe, and as a 6 or 7 year old I was fascinated to see her sketch. NOT that my parents were looking for, or planning to run a ski lodge (then called the Tucker House), but it came attached to the perfect barn for my father’s future Silver by Skinger shop and studio on the Mountain Road. Here is the drawing Alice made for the cover of our ski lodge brochure.
According to a real estate ad our house and barn were built in 1841. The barn still had cow stanchions and a dirt floor when my parents bought it in late 1950s. Alice’s drawing at left was our living room (full of happy skiers) and on the right is how our place looked driving up the Mountain Road after my father got his shop Silver by Skinger up and running. The living room drawing was part of Alice’s brochure for our ski lodge. The barn burned to the ground during first owners after us in early mid 1970s. It was a mexican restaurant in those years (Tortilla Flat I think). Later it was a bed and breakfast called Woodchip Inn which my husband and our son and I stayed in once in around 2001. It was completely torn down to make way from some new venue in approximately 2014 or 2015.
It was located across from a meadow when my parents purchased it in late 50’s and after a few short years that meadow was sold in three lots and became 3 commercial establishments. The first is now called Northern Lights Lodge and when first built it was called The Grand. You can see the location of our house diagonally across the road from it. Our place shows as of April 2018 as a cleared out site.