These are Vermont artist Diane Augusta Gabriel’s top 16 Quotes on Life
- Eliezer J Sherman
- Dec 24, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: May 11, 2021
My aunt, Diane Gabriel, was the first artist I was exposed to as a child. My earliest memories of her are from her wedding to my uncle, retired University of Vermont professor Mark Stoler, at his property in Starksboro, Vermont. I came to cherish that property, nestled atop a hill among the Green Mountains and with a distant view of Lake Champlain.
Some years after her marriage to Mark, she built a barn on their property, down by a man-made pond, where she toiled away on her art over the latter summers of her life until her sudden passing at age 70 on Christmas Eve, 2017, just four weeks after her mother passed away at age 97 on Thanksgiving. I was fortunate to have spent a handful of summers with her, learning and doing arts and crafts with her in the barn – making molds of my hands, creating pinhole photography from scratch, working together on the garden, and delighting in the occasional afternoon thunderstorm.
On October 16, 2015, Kate Blofson interviewed my Aunt Diane for the Vermont Historical Society. Diane contributed immensely to the budding arts scene in Vermont from the 70s until the present day. She lauds the Frog Hollow Vermont Craft Gallery for supporting Vermont's artists. And she will be holding a posthumous exhibition at Burlington City Arts from February 12 to May 15, 2021.
The full VHS interview can be found online, here. However, I compiled a list of my top 16 favorite quotes from the interview, which I feel exemplify my aunt’s wry, unique, and honest perspective.
1. On witnessing her high school friends, whom she described as a gang, beating up a gay couple in New York with fallen branches: “Whatever it was, I knew it was wrong. I knew it was very wrong. I left and never hung out with them again.”
2. On love and the 1960s in New York: “We started living together after, like, 10 minutes... The pill had been invented. You could sleep with whomever you wanted. But me and my girlfriend, we agreed we’d only sleep with the people we were in love with.”
3. On starting to garden when she moved from NYC to Vermont: “I remember wanting to participate in this magic. It was magic. Good magic.”
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4. On visiting an artist friend in New Mexico: “I remember thinking, and I thought the roads in Vermont were bad…Her baby’s name was Rainbow Shishkoff (chuckles).”
5. On a creative period in her life: “I felt so creative, I felt like I was a garden.”
6. On her father and his love for canines: “He treated his dogs like he shoulda treated his children and he treated his children like he shoulda treated his dogs.”
7. On her father’s opinion of family therapy: “He slammed his hand down on the therapist's table and said, there is nothing wrong with my family. And I never went back.”
8. On her art classes at Goddard College: “[University of Vermont] was for straight people. Goddard was for… not straight people… The [model] had a rather large penis.”
9. On fitting in in the small Vermont town where she bought property: “I am still known in Duxbury as the woman who breastfed at the town meeting.”
10. On some of her latest work: “When we go upstairs I’ll show you my work with teabags… which sounds really stupid but really it’s very interesting.”
11. On privilege: “We all are born into certain circumstances, and those circumstances are the hand that we are dealt. Period”
12. On an unknown intruder nabbing her cannabis crop: “This marijuana was so big, you needed a hatchet to cut it down… To this day we have no idea who came and chopped down the marijuana.”
13. On getting high when the electricity would go out at night: “Being high in the golden light of the kerosene. It was really quite lovely”
14. On her acquaintance with Bernie Sanders: “Bernie really, really cares about people and the situations people live in.”
15. On the karma in Vermont: “Vermont was very early no slavery. One of the only states that hippies didn’t get killed in in the 1970s. I think there’s good karma in Vermont. And I loved it; I do.”
16. On learning: "I really believe that when you're a child you learn with your heart. And then when you grow up, you learn with your mind."
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