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WOODSTOCK — Though she lived a deliberately low-key life, Andrea Trzaskos was something of a polymath.
When she wanted to learn something, she just did it. She studied economics at Wellesley College, but later earned a Vermont Master Gardener certification, and took a certified financial planner course with ease. She took care of some of Woodstock’s finest gardens and was one of the first women to serve on the Woodstock Fire Department.
She picked up art in much the same way, starting with a ceramics class in Rochester, Vt., in 2009.
“Before too long, it was pretty clear to me that the work she was doing was pretty impressive,” her husband, Todd Trzaskos, said in an interview.
From around 2011, when she started to spend more time making art, until 2022, when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and stopped working, Andrea Trzaskos developed a daring and prolific artistic practice. She died at the end of last September, at age 54.
Collective: The Art of Craft, a collaborative gallery in Woodstock of which Trzaskos was a member, is showing a range of her work through the summer. The gallery is a stop on the Vermont Crafts Council’s Open Studio Weekend, on May 23 and 24, when more than 140 studios and other venues across the state will be open to the public.
The work on display at Collective shows Trzaskos’ rapid growth as an artist, from painted two-dimensional forms to incised three-dimensional works that display both great technical skill and adventurous use of line, color and composition.
Where much of the ceramic work made in the Upper Valley is turned on a pottery wheel or hand-assembled in long spirals of clay, Trzaskos specialized in slab rolling, a technique that creates a uniform thickness of clay that can then be shaped.
She gravitated toward tableware for its utility, Todd Trzaskos said. She started out making tiles, plates and platters, decorated with scenes from the natural world. At Collective, the pieces on display feature kingfishers, hummingbirds, swallows, dragonflies and irises.
Trzaskos had “an innate quality” of bringing her natural subjects to life, Nicholas Seidner, a ceramicist from Middletown Springs, Vt., and a member of Collective’s management team, said in an interview.
“Animal spirits, I guess, is how I would refer to them,” Seidner said.
A display of four vessels of different sizes and shapes, all bearing images of cranes, gives a sense of an artist playing with composition, but also fully in control of it. Two square plates show formal, standing cranes, but in one the bird is centered and in the foreground and in the other the bird is at the edge of the field and part of a larger whole. Another crane takes flight from the left-hand edge of a long platter, winging into the space and giving it a feeling of movement and energy.
The fourth of these works is an irregularly shaped dish, from which a crane is taking off, flying not into but out of the frame. The shaped dish is a sign of where Trzaskos’ work was heading.
Slab-rolled clay can be shaped into a wide range of forms. Trzaskos would craft supports to hold the clay in place as it dried before firing it in a kiln and then glazing it. As her practice grew, so did her experimentation with larger shapes, including vases and other vessels that combine formal structure, such as a square base and a lower half with defined corners, with openings that seem to launch themselves upward, as if the clay was billowing as it was shaped.
She often decorated these shapes with a technique called sgraffito, where an artist carves or cuts through an upper layer of color or glaze to reveal a second color beneath it. She also incised designs directly into the clay.
Vessels Trzaskos made with these techniques are like nothing else I’ve seen in the Upper Valley, or anywhere else. They seem to quietly command the space around them, but also invite viewers to study the details.
The evolution of her work was ongoing until her health forced her to stop. She had crossed the porous boundary between craft and art, Todd Trzaskos said.
“She was always pushing herself to try something new or do something more difficult,” he said. “That was her anyways.”
Andrea Trzaskos grew up partly in Hawaii and partly in Chile before finishing her schooling in Idaho. Her father was a NASA scientist, and she was raised among academics and intellectuals. She could have done pretty much anything.
Instead, she chose to live in Vermont, to work everyday jobs, including in retail and as a master gardener. She maintained a website for her work, but it is not flashy.
“She was very modest and not interested in a high profile life in any way, despite the fact that she was really brilliant,” Todd Trzaskos said. They met in aikido classes in the Boston area, and Andrea moved to Vermont in 1994, where Todd was living. They were married in 1995 and have lived for many years in Stockbridge, Vt.
But her art would have pushed her into the public eye, Trzaskos said, which would have posed a challenge for her. Not long before her diagnosis, the couple were working on a plan to develop her art career further, which makes her illness and passing seem doubly cruel.
The show at Collective is designed to put more of her work out into the world. Already, some has been donated to the cancer centers that treated her, and notecards she’d made with bird designs are now in the hands of the Vermont Institute of Natural Science.
There’s more work to restock the Collective show when pieces are sold, and there are works on display at the gallery of Trzaskos’ teacher and mentor Judy Jensen, in Rochester. Jensen is reachable through judyjensen.com.
“I don’t want it to sit in a storage space,” Todd Trzaskos said.
Andrea was not interested in her own legacy, and like most artists she made work that interested her. It outlives her, as art is meant to do.
“I’m fortunate to have visited and lived in a variety of natural environments, and in my work, I am able to draw from it all,” she wrote in an artist’s statement that accompanies the Collective show. “Tropical forests… desert skies… oceans… mountains… wildlife… wind… water… snow… clouds… birds… I spend time outdoors as much as I can, and the inspirations are endless.”
Collective – The Art of Craft shows work by Andrea Trzaskos through September. For more information, go to collective-theartofcraft.com.
For more information about Open Studio Weekend, go to vermontcrafts.com.
World premiere
The Dartmouth Wind Ensemble premieres a new symphony by Mexican composer Arturo Marquez with a performance at 7:30 Saturday night in the Hopkins Center’s Spaulding Auditorium that will also be livestreamed.
Marquez’ “Sinfonía Nómada” explores the fertile subjects of migration and nomadic culture. The Hop took the lead in commissioning the piece, but was joined by more than 40 other institutions, including The President’s Own Marine Band, the Eastman School of Music and Yale University.
Saturday’s program also features multiple other works by Marquez, who is considered a national treasure in Mexico. The performance expands the Hop’s Mexican Repertoire Initiative, a musical exchange program founded by the Hop in 2022.
For tickets ($20) and more information, go to hop.dartmouth.edu.
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