Walton Blodgett | Walton Blodgett Watercolors

A "Walton Blodgett" is a watercolor painting depicting the very core of Vermont. Walton Blodgett, the painter, lived 22 years in Stowe. Moving here in 1941 from Connecticut, he trained under George Luks in New York and George Pierce Ennis in Maine. Blodgett captured the light and life of Vermont in the 1940’s and 50’s.

Wally, as some knew him, lived on Route 100 across from the Shaw's supermarket. His studio, next to the house, provided a magnificent view of Mt. Mansfield and he could watch and paint the various times of day in all seasons.

His paintings are hanging in many of the homes in Stowe. The Green Mountain Inn still has the largest public display of his work in their dining room and lobby. These were collected by a former owner who had a special relationship with the painter, enabling him to decorate his inn and the painter to feed his family. His other paintings in Stowe are prized for their personal meaning to the families whose homes and farms he painted.

Walton Blodgett had that unique ability to paint the essence of a subject. He chose his subjects for their simplicity: a barn or a home, or even a single tree were featured. He drew boldly, filling even a small sheet of paper, creating the illusion of a larger image. He could paint blocky, monotonous rock surfaces in a granite quarry or the "twiggyness" of a row of trees on a property line.

When he included figures they were children pulling sleds or a farmer harnessing his team of horses in the barnyard. Stylistically, his figures were cartoonlike and not real portraits, but they lent warmth to the pictures. He was foremost a landscape painter.

Walton Blodgett filled sketchbooks with ideas for painting and then, in the studio, he would translate those ideas into watercolours at his drawing table. As his eyesight deteriorated, he memorized the order of the mixed pans of watercolour at his worktable so that he could correctly choose his colours without actually seeing them. This explains why his later paintings tend to be simpler, more concerned with larger areas and less with details.

When Wally mixed colours, sometimes the pigment was so intense that it was hard to tell dark blue from dark green or black. As he chose to simplify his subjects, his palette consisted of only six or eight colours. In a letter to a niece, he suggested that any black that came from a tube and not mixed by the artist only "deserved to be fed to the family dog or massaged in the gums!" White also deserved the same fate deeming "if you want white, leave the paper white.’ The complexity of colours he achieved with a limited palette makes his work even more admirable. Fall scenes are a riot of reds, oranges and yellows; winter roads and snow banks on a sunny day are icy blues and grays; and the cool of summer in the shade of maple trees is in the darkest greens.

Although his paintings are 20 to 40 years old, they are "now." Some of the houses and farms he painted are still here, and those that are gone are vividly remembered by the paintings he left us. When the viewing public looks at a "Walton Blodgett," they see "Vermont."

Written by Vera Beckerhoff and reprinted from the "Essence of Stowe," with permission