Edward Cornell is a local artist who is known for his oil paintings and perhaps even more so for his monumental sculptures at The Art Farm. He creates his works at Crooked Brook Studios located between Wadhams and Whallonsburg, NY.
Crooked Brook Studios was first known as an art farm in connection with the Adirondack Harvest Festival’s Farm Tour in 2005.
Becoming an art farm encouraged talking about [my] sculptures as if they were bio-organic eruptions, a conceit which is encouraged by their leisurely and seasonal growth patterns. They began appearing in the wetlands below the pond, and up near the barn and then in the pond, and then up behind the barns, in an area now known unavoidably as the sculpture garden… (Crooked Brook Studios)
About Edward Cornell’s Art
July 4 by Edward Cornell (1995 Oil on panel, 18″ x 24″)
Stillness permeates his works: a hushed poetry that in its unsentimental and trenchant character recalls the views of empty roads and impenetrable woods of Edward Hopper. (Susan Alyson Stein, from her introduction to the Art Farm show catalogue in 1996.)
See a gallery of some of Cornell’s work on his website including his:
If you’d like to learn about his creative process he also shares a bit about how he creates his monumental sculptures and paintings on his website.
I didn’t take formal lessons. My teachers were my sons Ethan and Noah who had gone on to art school and a friend who is a curator of painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She would take me through the galleries and into her shows. We talked and I spent time alone with the great paintings.
In time I found a life here at Crooked Brook on an old farm in the Adirondack Park. […] I have my own swamp, a brook and a forest that has secret places and stands next to a vast primeval wilderness. I have an emotional companion. I get into NYC a lot, haunt the museums and stay with my sons who still live the art life in the big city. And I paint and make stuff out of junk. (Edward Cornell)
Tour the Art Farm
The Art Farm is open to visitor’s year-round who make appointments. Learn about the art farm and its guided tours with the information below from the Art Farm’s brochure:
A guided tour of the farm begins in the commodious nineteenth century barn with its immense pegged-together, hand-hewed beams. The Wild Ride, a large collage on the south wall assembled from items including a wasp nest and a child’s cart dating from the 1920s, one wheel of which is the cover of a milk can, evokes America’s journey from the Great Crash to our Landing on the Moon.
Heron by Edward Cornell
A collection of monumental sculptures and found objects is spread about on the grounds and around the pond. Here are four of the many objects which will suggest the variety of works on view: Mortgage Crisis, incorporating a large video dish and a hot tub sawn in two; an original McCormick Deering Reaper Binder, c. 1930; The Angel of Inerrancy Conveying Well-Meaning Souls to Hell; and Heron, a single bent piece of pipe, essentially untouched, installed in the pond.
Visitors are invited to cross the bridge and walk up into the woods where they can picnic and enjoy an unencumbered view of the valley extending all the way to Hurricane Mountain. If you wish you may bring your own art materials and work in the great outdoors.
Edward Cornell (Credit: Crooked Brook Studios)
The Art Farm is located at 154 Sayre Road in Westport, NY (on the back road between Wadhams and Whallonsburg).
Contact Edward Cornell to arrange a visit to the Art Farm or to commission a piece:
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