Chandler Center for the Arts - Artist Talk with Phil Godenschwager 8/22/2026

Good afternoon. Um, welcome to Chandler. Um, this is part of our Chandler Gallery series that actually is looking at some of the contributions that people have made over time to our community. We had a show of Jim Sardonis last summer. We're going to have another exhibit um of Marjgerie Ryerson's water music this fall. Um, and in the winter we're going to have one of David Powell, who ran um, Porcupine Graphics for a long time. So, it's kind of a season of retrospection for us. Um, and I find it really exciting, maybe because of my own age. Um, I have known Phil for a long time. Um, and I've always been really impressed with his adaptability as an artist and how he uses so many different tools in the things that he does and I've always found that incredibly inspiring. Um, and I really love his stained glass work. Um, so everything else just felt but that has always really captured my eye. Um, I took a stained glass class with him and I never finished my piece, but it was just great to be inspired by him. So, um, this show is 50 years of his work and we have t-shirts, stickers, other things. But when I saw that these t-shirts are from pieces that he did for his very first show 50 years ago, I thought, how circular. Um, and without any more ado, I'd love to introduce Bill Goldener. >> I have to I have to get up close to this. I just move this out of the way. I can I can make it up as we go along. Right. >> Yeah. >> At the risk of repeating a lot of what I said two weeks ago, um I have been in living in Randolph now for just about 50 years, give or take a couple. Um moving up to Mont Pier for a year or two and over to Planefield when I was working uh for Great American Salvage Company up in Mont Pier back in the 80s. So other than that, um I have spent the greater part of my adult life here working at and trying to work as an artist. It's not always easy in there's not a lot of uh we don't call this an art town. I don't. Um, but there are a tremendous a lot of creative people here in the area and in Randolph. And I've always found uh ways to piece it together here, whether I'm making a uh menu cover for a local restaurant. I've done a number of signs up and down Main Street over the years. Um, done a little bit of glass work, residential, commercial here. Anybody ever went into the Randolph National Bank and looked at those big commercial transoms over the picture window? That was one of the first restorations I ever undertook. And I had no idea what I was doing. And I don't even remember how I got them down out of there because they must weigh about 60 or 80 lbs a piece, let alone get them onto a workt and and make them solid again. Now, as I look at them, 45 years later, they they need restoration again, and I'm not going to do it, but somebody will. Um, a little bit of background. Um, I grew up in a military family, uh, traveling first 18 years of my life. uh probably moved at least to 16 different houses and probably as many schools and uh literally the only thing that was constant that I always carried with me was a was a drawing pad and and that ability to uh to make art. Um kind of like having your best friend with you all the time, I guess. But um in the course of all that time, I had some really uh good teachers, people that encouraged me. I think that's really important for young people. Um you can't overlook um having somebody say, "Hey, that's really nice. You should try it again." Um I also at this point in time will make a uh a point of bringing out the fact that I spent 12 years with the uh wind scouting. I was a cub scout, a boy scout, an explorer, and an Eagle Scout. And I make um no bones about the fact that that was a tremendous education in goal oriented learning. You know, everything uh has a purpose, a start, and a finish. And you don't get your merit badge if you don't finish it. And it's a great learning opportunity for kids. I I'm somewhat disappointed these days and what I hear and read about where it's come to or even if it's you know looking back at bad experiences I never had a bad experience. So for me, um, it was one of those opportunities that again, everywhere we moved, whether it was to the Philippines or Greece or Germany or Kentucky or Ohio or Virginia, there was a scout troop there with a group of guys. I could slide right in and have a ready group of people to relate to and and have shared experience. So, I just that's a plug. I think that's something that's really missing in a lot of communities these days. Um, again, I was very much encouraged as a young man from my mother to take up painting when I was 8 years old. And if I wasn't painting, I was doing whatever craft was available around me. Whether it was um doing copper engraving or making a leather belt or a popsicle stick race car or, you know, a softbox derby car, you name it, something. It was always working with my hands. And um that early education that working with my hands is kind of something that has carried me through to what I do today, which is as long as my fingers work, I'll be making something somewhere. And uh I continued on into junior high school. Uh took up sculpting, had my first regional show in Maryland in the 12th grade. I'm not the 12th grade guy. I'm going to the seventh grade, which uh you know, a little bit of early recognition makes you think, hey, maybe there's something to this. I should stick to it. And um carried right on into high school where I was a horrible student. >> Got an F in algebra in the 11th grade. They never made me make another stab at mathematics, but they let me take two art classes and a mechanical drawing class. and graduated from high school in Port Knox, Kentucky with the high school art award for my high school cuz that's what I did. And um passed up an opportunity to go to West Point and went to art school instead at Ohio University, which um didn't make my father very happy being a 30-year military officer about to retire. And uh so I compromised and went into ROC and consequently would just show up at the art building on Saturday mornings in a full dress uniform straight from parade and uh try to fit in. Uh worked for a couple of years, but by 1969 things were getting a little hairy and uh my politics was changing and uh I dropped out of ROC. But um when I started into school, the last thing my parents wanted me to do was become an artist. So they had a program called advertising design. And I had no clue what it was, but it sounded like you could make a living at it. So I signed up for advertising design. And a couple years later, that translated back into a a new degree called graphic design, which sounded a little bit less formal. but not quite so welldirected as um we did everything from learning to silkcreen and illustration and package design and um but never really learning what we were going to do for a living. That was something that they hadn't quite figured out yet. Yeah. So, uh, throw on top of that all the turmoil of the late 60s and early 70s and, uh, by the time I was ready to graduate in 1971, I think it was the second year that Ohio University was closed down to um, anti-war riots. And about 4 weeks before I was supposed to graduate, um they basically told the entire campus of 25,000 students to get out of town within 24 hours and we all left to have a graduation ceremony. >> They mailed us a diploma that September. And so, uh off we wandered with no place to go. and a friend of mine whose family just happened to have a camp down here in Gazeville, Vermont, said, "Well, why don't you come and be my camp counselor for the summer and teach arts and crafts?" So, that was my first seeing of Vermont, experiencing Vermont, and falling in love with Vermont and saying somehow, sometime, somewhere I'm going to manage to stay here. That was the last year that the summer camp operated. I call myself the last Gazville camp counselor. So we came back next summer anyway and me and two buddies and had the whole camp to oursel and no work and no jobs. And a local contractor, his name was Chapen Pratt, the whole Pratt family down in Gazville. He said, "You know, you boys show up here on Monday morning with a hammer, tape measure, and a square, and I'll teach you to build houses." And so, we started off working as carpenters. Uh, kind of used my graphic design skills a little bit, but it was a whole new undertaking of how to work with tools and how to build. And it was so much fun. We came back the next summer and did it again. In the meantime, as soon as it got cold down there, there wasn't a single cabin with heat in it. We all went back to Ohio. I got a real job um working as a uh layout artist for a department store in Columbus and trying to put my graphic design skills to work. uh learned a little bit, mostly that I really disliked it and uh left there after about four months and found a job doing rock and roll posters for a promoter out of Cleveland and continued to work for him for the next four years doing concerts and stage passes and newspaper ads. And then back to Vermont, more carpentry, and back to Columbus for more rock and roll concerts in the fall. And finally, uh, I thought maybe I should get serious and see if I couldn't get a real job and move to Cincinnati and went to work in a graphic design studio with 35 artists in the pool. um where I really got my education as a designer. Um whole different paradigm. I didn't have a salary. Didn't even have an hourly wage. I may have had an hourly wage, but it was so small. I didn't know what it was. But we only got paid when we were working on the board. So you would sit there all day long waiting for a salesman to come by with a job and you'd throw it on your desk and you'd just been to see a brand manager at PNG and say, "Okay, I need four layouts for a 10-centent off patch for a tide box. I'll be back in 3 hours and click on the clock and go to work." And that's how I learned to work to the clock because in four hours he was back and if I wasn't done, it was gone. And if they didn't like the layouts, I didn't get to do the next step of the work, which was do the comp on it. And if I didn't get to do the comp, I couldn't do the finished art. So I lost a week's work. But it was a great undertaking, great education, and uh I stuck with it for almost 3 years until in 1975 re first of many recessions hit. And uh they said, "Well, there's not much work in Cincinnati. Let's go to Oregon. See if there's anything out there." Um, make a long story short, we got to Oregon. There wasn't anything out there either. So, after 3 months in Oregon, friend of ours said, "Well, why don't you come to New Orleans? There's plenty of work down here." So, me and a buddy were traveling. We headed to New Orleans and got there in November of that 75. Within a week, my buddy Joe had a job managing a bar on St. Charles Avenue up town. And two weeks later hired me at the bar back. And within a month, I was bartended and we were having a great old time. Too good a time. But um I saw an opportunity to um to start doing my own work, which I've been doing illustrations and cartoons since college. Um we had a great group at OU that about six of us who met maybe twice a month just to sit around and draw political cartoons. One of the fellas there, his name was Bruce Jorgensson, was the lead cartoonist for the U Post >> and very well known for his anti-war cartoons in those days. Um, so I started putting together an idea of a show while I was in New Orleans, lined up a gallery down in the French Quarter and spent the next six months just painting all day long, bartending all night. And um by April I had a pretty good size show together and opened. Nobody came. Didn't sell a single piece. Fact I didn't have a 25 cents for the street car that night. So I walked home and uh about a week later I got a little tiny ad review in the Times Picky and their art critic decided he really liked the show and said everybody you should go see this and um and that second week I sold out half the show and again I said you know maybe there is something to this you know keep it up but in the meantime uh life in New Orleans was catching up with me and I knew if I didn't get out of there really fast I was going to get stuck and so called up my old friend in Gazville and said, "Can I come to there for the winter?" He said, "Sure, the house is yours. Come on out." That was October 76. Yeah. And uh I showed up in Gayville and started cutting firewood in October and out about a half a cord cut. Friend of mine up on Fish Hill, fell named Bill Fabian came down and said, "You're not going to make it down here." He said, "You need to come home with me." And I did. And I went up there on Fish Hill and stayed for four years. and um first got myself embedded into Randolph, which um oddly enough at that time our our land lady was a lady named Hannah Jeff and she was very much involved with the Chandler already. The Chandler had not been opened in quite some time and was still um in pretty poor shape. And that I think it was the summer of 1977, she was over in the in the main hall over here and started wiping one of the walls. They were all painted mint green. Probably been that way since World War II from what I remember. And she discovered that there were some decorations underneath the paint and said, "You know, maybe we should look into this a little further." And the following summer, she, as I recall, secured a grant, got a bunch of high school kids, and they went in there and started washing all that green paint off the walls, made a tremendous mess, ruined the Wayne Scotting, ruined the floor. There was green paint everywhere. So, they had to refinish all the floors, take all the seats out. and a group of us, myself, lady named Marian Mcris and Ron Hernandez, and I'm sure there's a half a dozen other people that are involved, but my memor is a little foggy on that. But we spent weeks and repainted all those murals in the main hall for the first time. Um, it was really exciting to see this place come around and it was the beginning of the whole push to restore the mu the music hall, the gallery, um, the community getting excited about it and and a lot of us really feeling for the first time like part of um, And you know over the years it's I think this was what was the term we used for this last talk? Serendipity. I had to look it up again. But the idea of falling into whatever is in front of you without really I'm I'm not a person who plans much beyond maybe 3 hours from now. Tomorrow is a total blank. Um, as I became more and more embedded in Randolph, I fell into things. One of the first things was Vermont Castings, which was just getting going down the bottom of the hill here. And uh, Duncan was searching around and trying to put together a team to build the vigilant stove patterns. They had one stove, the D the Defiant, which was already making them a uh a national, you know, I don't know what the word is. They were becoming a a feature in the stove industry for the first time in years, kind of reinventing the whole movement. and he put together a team of people including myself and another cabinet maker from Bethl named Joey Bgamo and a fiddle maker named Tony Nubold from here in Randolph and uh Mike Pman was a machinist. I mean, it was just this odd group of people and he got together and uh basically orchestrated the this let's make the patterns for this stove when none of us had ever done it before. So we had to learn from him and he was learning at the same time. Or if we needed to, he'd send us off to meet with somebody who did know what they were doing and learned from them. He even sent me to Allentown to the pattern making shop down there to learn to make patterns. And um you know, it's it's all related. It's it's design. It's art. It's an ability to uh kind of flow with the punches and learn something new every time you turn them around. Um I went from working at Vermont Castings to falling into another project with some friends of mine from Randolph Center who uh Ben and Mary Brookmeyer. This was in 1979 and they had purchased an old amusement park in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And uh I got a letter from them in March of that year. And I won't put it in exact terms they put it in, but it basically said, "Get some artists together and get down here. We've got we've got a park to put together." and I gathered up six or eight people that I worked with. We went down to Lancaster and we had a 40 acre park with 16 rides and 300 signs that needed to be done in 90 days and in 90 days we opened that park. Unfortunately had some issues. There was a polio epidemic amongst the Amish. a little event up the 30 miles up the road called Three-Mile Island happened the second week we started the work and there was a gas crisis so nobody came to Lancaster County >> in this summer of 1979 so we closed the park in 30 days and limped back to looked for the next opportunity which came knocking within about four months and It used to be un some of you people maybe remember Jimmy Hill the auctioneer and uh Jimmy had introduced me to a fellow up in Monture who just started a new company the year before called Great American Salvage Company and so I was the fourth employee. We were still working out of a garage on Berry Street and uh Steve says, "I need somebody restore stained glass windows." At that time I had made all of three and uh basically took it up when I was in Oregon when I had nothing to do. I took a class out there called little place called Ma Karn's Art Center in Eugene and they offered a stained glass class which I took for 10 nights. I made one window and hauled it all the way to New Orleans back to Vermont and over the course of the next three years I made three windows and Steve said, "Well, there's not can't be much to it. I'll give me a table over in the corner and I'll go buy some broken windows and you see if you can fix them. >> And again, it's again, you apply all that skills and former training and you know, it's amazing what you can do when you put your hand your mind to it. Fast forward uh six years and the salvage company has close to 20 employees and five franchises on the east coast and 20,000 square ft of Midtown Manhattan and uh a few hundred windows repaired under my belt and basically said I think I've had enough of this too. time to do something different. And right about that time, I saw an ad in a paper for a company called H, Advanced Animations, and they were not yet in Vermont, still in Danbury, Connecticut, but they were planning on moving up here to Stockbridge and opening up a plant that next spring. And they needed a creative director. Um, oddly enough, um, the owner of that company was a old carney and the fact that I had worked on an amusement park in Lancaster, he thought was all the uh, background I needed. And u, and so again, I fell into another job, another whole career. And uh I went down there finally in April of that year for a interview and um he showed me this drawing that had been done by a design group out of Manhattan called the Walker Group of a clock tower that needed to be done for Afro Schwarz. And he says, "It's a great idea, but this won't work. We can't It had things dangling off of arms." and he says it's it can't be animated. We need to uh figure out a way to make this work. And he threw out some ideas how he thought it might might be cut down to size and said, "Why don't you see if you could draw it up for me?" Which I went home for the weekend, came back on Monday with a drawing. He loved it. He says, "I think we can do that." and uh so you can start tomorrow and we'll build this clock. And that turned into one of the uh major undertakings of my career. That FAO Schwarz clock on Fifth Avenue in Midtown was like something that everybody saw and everybody knew and it made its way into that Tom Hanks movie big and and it made the company explode overnight. Within 6 months of going to work there, we had 50 employees and more work that than we knew what to do with, which was a bad thing because 3 years later when I hadn't had a day off, I said, "I'm done with this. Time to do something different." And you know, the whole time I'm here in Randolph. I mean, I still here in Randolph and all these things are are happening within a 35 milei radius and it's it's amazing what you can do from a little town in the middle of nowhere. Except that we're in the middle of Vermont and that's not nowhere. Everybody says, "Wow, it must be nice to live in the middle of Vermont and get to work in New York and get to go to China and get to go to Japan and get to go to Italy and do all these installations all over the world and you get to come home and go back to the end of your dirt road and not have to worry about the traffic." But I feel like I'm wandering again. Um, you know, so again, it's back back to everything that centers out of here. I mean, later on when I left Advanced Animations, I went in onto my own in 1988 and opened up my company called Atlantic Art, Glass, and Design, which is a company of one. And I had this tremendous um group of people that I had met and worked with in all these different projects and I could call on them and bring them together, do a project, never got to go back to their respective jobs and do what they do. Um and we started coming up with all kinds of things to do. Um, I met Kevin Hardy who was just getting going with the White River Craft Center. He approached me in 1999. He said, "We're trying to build something here. We working with kids at risk in the in the community and we're trying to set up different kinds of programs that they can learn. We had somebody showing them how to build cars. We had he was teaching them carpentry. They had just really um gotten hold of the old um nursing home up the end of Randolph Avenue. We're starting to restore it. He said, "You could come down and teach stained glasses. That's something the kids could learn. We've got a potter coming in to teach pottery classes. We've got weavers. We've got all these things that we're trying to get going for the kids. And over the course of time, I think we can build something here. So in exchange for a very large studio space down on the far end of Weston Street, I started teaching classes there for him. I did that for 17 years and um and it afforded me the space to do all sorts of side projects. Um, again I go back to my uh time at Great American Salvage, which had by that time succumbed to uh bad business practices and folded and they were my old friend Steve Israel who founded the company along with a couple of other companies, one called Catamount Brewery and then also Vermont Distillers, decided he was going to get into the home remodeling business down in Westchester County in New York. So, he put together a group of carpenters and we ended up working down in that area for the better part of 20 years. And I became his go-to designer for all sorts of remodeling projects and design projects and construction projects. And in the process of that with my carpentry background and my salvage background, I taught myself architecture the wrong way. But it worked. And again, you fall into things. And while I was down there working in my studio one day, one of the uh heads of the architecture program up at VTC walked in and said, "Well, our our we have a man who teaches what they call architectural board drafting, which is in the freshman year up there. They're one of the few architecture programs that still taught the old style T-square pencil handd drawing. And he said, "We need somebody to teach that class. Can you can you do it?" And we need them next week. >> I not do it. You know, I know basically how to do it. Maybe not the right way, but I can figure this out. And so I went up there in the morning and I took the class from the head of the department and then 1:00 in the afternoon I taught the class. I just took the notes that he gave me as if they were a student and then turned around and taught it. And after a couple of years of that, I started to get the hang of it myself and stuck it out for I think four or five years. I don't even remember how long now. up until 2008 when the recession hit and they laid off 25% of their adjunct faculty and back to the studio was started to do something else. But um you know what do you say about the life? What's it like to be an artist? I look around this room and I think half the people in this room are I know to be working artists and they all have a similar kind of story. Um, if you stayed here long enough, you tried a little bit of everything. Um, it's what it takes to uh to be an artist in Vermont. Um, one of the the best experiences I ever had around here was coming to to uh in contact with the Vermont Studio Center up in Johnson, Vermont. Um that happened about 1984 and they were casting around for their they were just getting kind of opening up and starting and as a thank you to the state of Vermont for all the help they had in getting established. They said we're going to do one week a year. We're gonna call it Vermont Artist Week and it's going to be almost free for Vermont artists only. And I was uh fortunate enough to be in their very first class in 1984. And uh I had been in Vermont well not quite 10 years and I didn't know anybody in the art community outside of Randolph. So this was an incredible opportunity to meet artists from every part of the state and to make connections for the first time and to really get a grip on what it's like to reach out to the broader community and discover how many people are out there in those hills and valleys working on their own, isolated, unconnected. and what they needed was just this kind of opportunity. And um again, it's it's kind of a a kudos to the the kind of people that come here and build something and then give it back to the people in the state because it's it made a huge difference in in my life. And uh in the kinds of people I met and the opportunities I had to expand outside of Randolph and um I've seen that happen over and over again. Um, as a matter of fact, they just called us back last summer for the I think it was, if I'm not mistaken, the 45th reunion, 45th anniversary of the Studio Center. They hunted down as many of us as they could find. They didn't find everybody. They didn't hunt hard enough, I think, cuz I could have pointed to at least a half a dozen more. And, uh, we had a little reunion show up there. It was it was really nice to do. Um there's a lot more opportunities for artists here today than ever before. Um I've been involved with the uh Vermont Arts Council since I first got here in 1976. Um they've been a tremendous help. They reach out to artists at all levels and all kinds of disciplines. It's not just the visual arts. It's it's music, it's dance, it's uh um you name it, they they they fund it. They're involved with it. Um they're one of the um big sources of public art in this state. And that's something else that I got involved with very early on. um initially through uh Advanced Animations because they did some large public projects for the state when I was first there. Um things like um we do animated characters to go around to uh teach kids about um drugs. Uh we did one early on called with Smokey the Bear that went around to uh had an animated Smokey teaching kids about fire safety, you know, very really simple things but big projects for them. And then um 1999 I heard they were going to build a uh chapel up at the veteran cemetery and that it was all going to be done by volunteer work. And I had uh read about it in the paper and I found out who the architect was and I called him up and I said, "You know, if you're going to build a chapel in Randolph Center, then you're going to need stained glass windows." And I think I I should do them because I'm already here and I know what I'm doing. And I volunteered to do those windows, which the next time I went to the Vermont Studio Center for Vermont Artist Week, I used that whole week to design those windows cuz I had the studio time and the space and the support of another entity to pull it off. And it's funny how all these little projects and people get all tied together because it all comes back to one thing. and support the arts in Vermont. And um that was just the beginning of my next 25 years of public art. And I now I think I have 12 of them under my belt. Um most all for um local projects. the Waterberry train. Um there's a ceiling 100 square foot skylight in the Burlington public work building in on Pine Street in Burlington. Few years ago I just finished a clock 6oot stained glass clock for the new Burlington South South Burlington City Hall. Um, I've done a few projects outside the state. I did a I think it was a 45 ft stained glass window in Rowan Oak, Virginia a few years ago for um private commission as a memorial window. Um, I did a three large stained glass windows for a new um housing project in East Boston a few years ago. It's just um all of this goes back to each one of these projects from the past. You know, I learned something every one of them. A new skill, a new way of working at scale. Um advanced animations taught me not to be afraid to make something big. Um it's just a lot of little projects piled on top of each other. Don't be afraid of it. Um, it's been an amazing long wonderful career and I'm happy to share it with this what I call a bookend gallery show. This is 50 years since uh that first show in New Orleans. And um I think there's something down there from every one of those years. So, it's been amazing to be able to pull it all together and put it down there and share it with the community and even to revisit it myself because some of these works are so old. I don't remember making them. It's really been a lot of fun. Um, I'd be happy to take any questions because I think I've talked long enough. Yes. So in 2023 when my wife and I rented your cottage on Westminster, I spent we were there two weeks and spent a lot of time looking there and was particularly fascinated. I didn't have the big picture you've given us now or in the show, but I spent a lot of time looking at drawings, often colored or paintings with a kind of infinity of small figures. So, they were often political commentary or political satire um which I just found riveting. You know, we're of the same generation. So in a sense it was evocative of political satire from the 60s and 70s to me much more interesting. But my question is in those incredibly complex pieces that were not that big but with you know dozens if not scores of characters and some kind of thematic cohesion. Did you plot those out in advance or was it improvisatory in the act of creating it? >> That particular approach to making those drawings I started doing when I was still in at OU. I started making it. It was a it was a conscious decision that I didn't want to be a and there's a lot of different ways of doing cartoons. You can be a panel artist. you can do um you know um what hasvent essentially become the graphic novel now um there's just the gag one page and I started experimenting with the idea of of telling an entire story on one page and sometimes in the beginning I would start in the traditional sense of working left to right and making it kind of follow a pattern and that later evolved D into this idea of um if I have a basic concept for a a uh a drawing I want to do um I'll lay out usually dead center the the theme of the drawing or the basic concept and then from there on it's it's sort of like a stream of consciousness as much like the way um Jack Carowak might Right? I would draw that way. Whatever the the next thought that came to your head, you try to tie it in or weave it in or layer it into the drawing, which you can do initially with a light pencil sketch so that you can overlap things and make things kind of interrelate. And then when you go back to ink it, then you can make things come forward and push to the background by actually working around those layers. and you can see what you what what is in the foreground, what is in the background. But I'm still working on that. And um I actually have an idea and I've been thinking about doing it for years. I haven't got to it yet. somewhere in in one of my hideaway storage lockers, I got these old uh player piano rolls and I wanted to do one that went clear around a room, you know, so that went in sequence but in a linear fashion and um but that's that's something that I'll get to one of these days. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. This was really interesting. >> Thank you.