For over 25 years I made a living as a Vermont Landscape painter and illustrator winning numerous awards. 2 Vermont Waterfowl Stamp Competitions, Illustrated nature books for Ron Rood and World Renown bird carver Floyd Scholz and have paintings in corporate and private collections all over the world. As age happens a degrading vision issue has put painting out of reach for now. 

 

This has me shifting my focus to a new venture Verde Mountain "where we create so that your memories live on..."  The premise is that individuals supply me with wood special to them and I turn it into functional products so that what the story that material represents to you, the customer, sees the light of day. It is not that broken maple rocker in the attic that you love, but the image of your grandmother sitting in it reading a young child a book. Pieces of old barns, items from a wedding, trees that have fallen or material from building restoration once thought useless are given a new life. 

 

As part of this mission, I also find items that provoke memories and create my Main Line of product. Old wooden tennis rackets, golf club heads, and field hockey sticks easily become earrings. Wood from trees damaged in Robert Frost's backyard in Shaftsbury, VT, a post removed from the Ticonderoga during restoration, a maple board that was inside the barn at Shelburne farms when a September 2016 lightning strike razed the building, even chips of mahogany that is a byproduct of the sculpture of Aries carved for the top of the Vermont State House has found new life in my shop. 

 

In a day and time of the disposable, quick in-quick out lifestyle where internet orders and social media has us disconnected as a society it is our hope to reconnect the purchaser with the value of a heartfelt passion to connect individuals by creating items of significance.