Life Story: For Gregg Blasdel, 'Every Day Was About Art'

Gregg Blasdel with a “Life and Death Rattle” Credit: File: Eva Sollberger ©️ Seven Days

This “Life Stories” profile is part of a collection of articles remembering Vermonters who died in 2024.

If asked about his accomplishments, Gregg Blasdel might have said he’d recently perfected a recipe for daikon radish cakes, or that he had taught his cat, Tootone, to roll over.

He valued these small successes — feats requiring the creativity, persistence and patience for which he was known — just as much as his larger achievements. Gregg died in June at age 83, after a reoccurrence of the esophageal cancer he had successfully treated 30 years ago.

Since the 1960s, he had been instrumental in defining and legitimizing the work of self-taught artists within the context of art history, traveling around the country to talk with them and document their expansive constructions. Gregg taught studio art and art history at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, and he created his own prints and sculptures up until his death.

Unlike the installations he studied, Gregg’s work was not obsessive or immersive but clean and technically skillful; he was experimental, always interested in learning new ways of doing things. One recent black-and-white print shows a carp swimming in broad swipes of ink. Silhouettes of actual plants and geometric forms seem to float on its surface; Gregg exposed the objects directly on the plate, using a nontoxic etching process. He rarely talked about the “why” of his work and simply followed his artistic intuition. As his friend and colleague Will Mentor described it, “He would just make something, and it’s that ineffable resonance — if it resonated, that was enough.”

Gregg grew up in Belle Plaine, Kan., the second of four brothers. His mom, Erma, was an oil painter; his dad, Red, ran the local grain elevator. About a block away from their house, a man named David Rousseau had built a whole world in his front yard out of colored concrete — a model city suspended over a fish pond. “I probably walked by it a hundred times — I took it for granted that it was always going to be there,” Gregg recounted in a 2021 panel discussion recorded by the Bennington Museum. When later asked why he had devoted so much of his life to documenting this kind of art, Gregg said, “because I didn’t think it would be saved.”

In 1968, soon after graduating from Cornell University with his MFA in 1967, he published “The Grass-Roots Artist” in Art in America, a seminal article that introduced several such artists’ work to a larger audience. He went on to publish, lecture and curate exhibitions on self-taught artists at major museums, championing their work and that of other “outsider” artists, who were often marginalized within mainstream society.

Gregg received research fellowships in 1967 and in the 1970s from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and the National Endowment for the Arts to document art environments all over the country. In some cases, he created the only remaining records of them.

Gregg’s daughter, Oakley, recalled going with her dad to upstate New York to visit the artist Clarence Schmidt and the rambling “House of Mirrors” he had created on his five-acre property. Its tar-covered towers made of windows and sticks rose above a forest of doll heads impaled on silver foil-wrapped trees. “It didn’t occur to me what a weird thing that was,” Oakley recalled. “It was like, This is just this guy’s kind of art.”

In 1974, Gregg separated from his wife, Ann, the mother of his kids Oakley and Illinois. While working on a book about Schmidt with his friend Bill Lipke, who taught art history at the University of Vermont, he fell in love with the Green Mountain State. Gregg joined Bill on the art and art history faculty at UVM for the next several years. He later met and married Sheryl Bellman, and their son, Max, was born in 1983. Until he and Sheryl split up in 1989, they lived in a rambling farmhouse in Underhill which Gregg was always working on. He began teaching at Saint Michael’s College in 1982 and stayed for the next three decades.

As an artist and teacher, Gregg was soft-spoken and unassuming, focusing more on art practice than theory. Mentor, his colleague at St. Mike’s, described how, before his students arrived, Gregg would stand perpendicular to the blackboard, “and he would take a piece of chalk, and he would make his arm go in a circle from that position to try and draw a perfect circle. He’d do it every morning. It was so quiet, and it was odd, in a kind of friendly, private way; I loved that about him.”

In 2005, Gregg married his partner of 32 years, Jennifer Koch, a former student at St. Mike’s and fellow artist. Over two decades, they made a series of 40-by-30-inch collaborative prints called “Marriages of Reason.” Each one is made from two very different images. Where Jennifer carved her woodcut blocks, Gregg took an experimental approach, sometimes building his reliefs from thin strips of veneer, sometimes etching. Jennifer’s halves are usually detailed and intricate — a tulip, a twisted skein of yarn — while Gregg’s are bold: a woven geometry of lines, a foot, an ink splotch in silhouette.

“Every day was about art,” Jennifer said. “The way he saw the world was creative.”

During the 2010s, Gregg managed the Burlington City Arts print studio at Memorial Auditorium, volunteering many hours to teach classes and keep the shop organized. BCA executive director Doreen Kraft remembered how he had systems for everything, so visitors could easily use the studio. He was equally welcoming as a teacher, with infinite patience.

He wasn’t afraid to experiment with new ideas. Doreen Kraft

“He had a brilliant way of bringing the ideas out of individuals … he wasn’t afraid to experiment with new ideas or to let people try things that he hadn’t tried before,” Kraft said. “He made himself both teacher and student — I think that’s a rare talent.”

Gregg and Jennifer traveled around the country, collecting artwork from and maintaining relationships with self-taught and folk artists, many of whom had mental health challenges. In particular, they grew to know Burlington artist Paul Humphrey, whose “Sleeping Beauties” series of xerox drawings numbered at least in the hundreds. Gregg helped the artist with everything from selling his work to making doctor’s appointments. Gregg valued these friendships and could talk to anyone: “He had a curiosity about the world and people and art,” Jennifer said, “and I think that he made people feel really listened to.”

Gregg’s perceptiveness and patience extended from people to objects to processes. He loved to cook and practiced recipes over and over until he got them right — and then would improvise and experiment with them. He spent hours discussing food with friends and family, and with Oakley in particular; they once spent a long, snowy New Mexico day learning to make tamales. On a trip through the Southeast, Gregg insisted on trying all the barbecue he could find and later concocted his own killer sauce.

He was meticulous in his art practice, and he could spend hours creating a specific cardboard form to hold up a plaster mold. He would often make his own tools for a one-time purpose — and then carve or paint them, turning them into art objects.

“Everything he used had this sense of value, and he would take the time and the attention to detail to honor it,” said artist Kevin Donegan, a close friend. “It wasn’t just people that he made feel special, but he imbued this sense of meaning on material as well.”

Gregg with “Devil’s House” Credit: Courtesy

Gregg’s artwork was incredibly varied. At Burlington City Arts in 2013, he showed “Bounty,” an installation of plaster-cast objects and body parts affixed to fence posts. His sculptures included a giant metallic catfish that seemed to hover and a miniature house frame brimming with tiny pieces of wood. On camping trips to Lake George, N.Y., Gregg would find sticks and turn them into painted snakes. He’d take dirt from his many travels (including all of the lower 48 states) and affix it in stripes to a bowling ball-size mud ball in the studio.

Despite his own tendency toward craftsmanship, he had a strong appreciation for what he called “make-dos.” He would swap photos of them with friends — a knife held together with twine, a creatively cobbled farm implement. One of Jennifer’s favorites is a small ceramic jug that broke; Gregg repaired it, aesthetically if not functionally, with a cardboard extension in the same folded geometric style.

Donegan and his partner, Susan Smereka, recounted how Donegan once gave Gregg a little plastic rabbit, spray-painted chrome. Soon after, they started finding plaster-cast versions of the same rabbit hidden in the house or studio. “Either he made something for you, or he found an image that he wanted to share,” Smereka said. “You always knew you were thought about.”

In 2023, Gregg presented “new works,” a solo show at Smereka and Donegan’s new new art studio in Burlington. It included his “Life and Death Rattles,” a series of intensely colored, joyful wooden constructions that make a cacophony when shaken — a noise that delighted him.

The original print version of this article was headlined “‘Every Day Was About Art’ | Gregg Blasdel, January 14, 1941-June 6, 2024”