The art of foliage season

People come to Vermont for plenty of reasons: the food and drink, the recreation, some peace and quiet.

But the leaf-peeping masses who motor around this time each year are unique, in that their main goal is to just look at things.

Nature provides the canvas and then paints it in vibrant colors that exist for only a few weeks, and people come from all over to witness the spectacle.

“They’ve definitely got their fall eyes on,” said Brad Highberger, owner of Inside Out Gallery on Mountain Road.

When tourists look at the world through leaf-peeping eyes, they tend to be more alert to beauty all over the place, on the lookout for colors and patterns both on the trees and off.

Art galleries and craft sellers are changing right along with the leaves, as curators and art-sellers hope to catch people with their fall eyes on.

At Inside Out, one of the best-sellers this time of the year is literal foliage art. Artist Booker Morey uses leaves from maples, poplars, oaks, aspens and other trees and “skelotonizes” them, reducing them to their most structural basis, so not much more than the veins is left. The result is a nearly transparent leaf that forever memorializes the fall colors, in green, orange, yellow and red.

Morey packages the leaves under glass, framed handsomely. Some of the displays are large enough to hang on the wall in a prominent place; others are packaged individually as eye-catching drink coasters.

Also popular this time of the year are photographs by John Geery of Clarendon, the only person Highberger knows who has been consistently selling photos for 40 years. Geery is a man for all seasons, and Inside Out trots out his work as the season demands, so naturally the Geery artwork on display right now lends a ruddy look to the walls. Geery doesn’t charge a lot for his photography, and Inside Out has dozens of plain matted photos in the $30 range.

“He sends us new stuff all the time,” Highberger said.

On the higher end of the art spectrum, at West Branch Gallery off Mountain Road, $30 isn’t going to get you far, and the gallery doesn’t try to sell foliage-specific pieces to tourist leaf-peepers. But owner-curator Tari Swenson certainly takes the time to mirror inside the autumn colors and lines on the hills outside. And some evocative pieces hanging now just feel like fall.

Kim Radochia, a Boston-area artist, has a couple of them at the West Branch. Her mixed-media creations consist of torn pieces of paper painstakingly attached in swirling patterns that resemble a murmuration of starlings (one on display is actually called “Murmuration IV”).

A large Radochia creation titled “Slots I” is like staring into one of those frequent dust devils that one sees in the fall, picking up leaves into a swirling mini-tornado. Swenson said that piece incorporates more than 25,000 individual pieces of paper; each one had to be held on the canvas until the glue set.

Another piece Swenson was preparing to put up in the gallery entryway is a stylized, painstakingly executed watercolor of an oak leaf by Stowe artist Idoline Duke. Measuring 30 by 53 inches, “Big Oak Leaf III” is a super-sized version of those ubiquitous tree-droppings that swirl into Vermont homes this time of year with each opening and closing of the front door.

Swenson said she doesn’t use a spreadsheet or very detailed plans ahead of time when she’s rearranging the gallery throughout the changing seasons, instead preferring to just walk around, looking and feeling the way things ought to be.

Obviously, she says, she’s not going to be dedicating wall space for a series of crocuses in the dead of winter; that would be “not very respectable” to a visitor to the gallery, to this state.

“The idea here is not to assault your senses, but to draw your eye naturally,” she said.