Local Artist Finds Inspiration in New Hampshire Woods

Rather than telling a story with wood, artist Stephen Bethel allows the woods to tell him its story. Bethel, founder of Bethel Farm Yoga and Living Arts Center in Hillsborough, transforms found tree branches by adding his own marks in the form of richly-colored plaster. Some of his pieces are wall-mounted works, and others are freestanding sculptures, some reaching 10 feet high. "A lot of my work is in the space between painting and sculpture," said Bethel. "I use color in a painterly sense but in a 3D context. The surface the color creates, whether shiny or matte, varies piece to piece." He's always drawn inspiration from the natural world. For years, he had noticed decaying trees in the woods near his home—pieces of birch park peeling in interesting shapes, for instance, and gnarly maple trees opening in new ways to reveal how they'd grown. He had also begun to collect interesting-looking pieces of wood. "I started to, finally, immediately respond to some of these pieces rather than portraying and depicting them in some way," he said. "It occurred to me to interact directly with these pieces and take prompts from shapes and voids that were presented to me in that found piece of wood, helping to illuminate the shapes it had formed." Bethel was a professional plasterer for many years doing drywall and drywall finishing and had perfected the technique of coloring plaster with pigment. For these pieces, he uses a whey-based urethane. "When it came to interacting with these pieces of wood I knew I could be very fluid with [plaster] and respond to them, working with their curves." Bethel was one of four artists whose work was recently featured in a group exhibition, "INTERSECTIONS II," at Anita Rogers Gallery in New York City. Each artist worked with different materials and techniques but were all united by their intuitive embrace of nature within their art. "It's been a shift in me giving up more control to nature rather than representing nature in some way from [the] outside," said Bethel, "Here, nature is the frame and foundation for the work. What's been so liberating to work in this way is I'm letting myself be led by prompts in the found pieces." Bethel specifically wanted to exhibit these pieces at a gallery in Manhattan. "An aspect of the New York show was being able to bring these pieces that were born from the woods around me and then transporting that into this ultra-urban situation, articulated in a different way," he said. About a year ago, Bethel began to set some of the sculptures into the landscape at Bethel Farm. "There's one in the center of the spiral bed where we grow flowers and another on a big boulder out in a field," he said. Those, among other pieces outside and in the dining hall, will be displayed at the farm beginning April 1 for visitors to enjoy. He plans to incorporate a yoga class with time for students to walk the farm and take a look at the artwork.