‘Follow the Water’ exhibition led by painter Anne Diggory, opens July 3 at Keene Arts
By James Lancel McElhinney
“Follow the Water” in the main gallery at Keene Arts celebrates the confluence of science and art in Anne Diggory’s paintings of the Ausable watershed. An adjoining space features artworks by invited artists Rachel Finn, Tim Fortune, Joy Muller-McCoola, James Prosek, and Kevin Raines in collaboration with the Ausable Freshwater Center. The show was organized by Keene Arts owner Malcolm MacDougall and Anne Diggory, who describes it as “… as a way of inviting the public to rediscover the Ausable River with fresh eyes, as they follow the water in its many forms and imagine multiple ways to experience it.”
Watersheds are the capillaries of Earth’s circulatory system. Civilizations formed along freshwater arteries that hydrated populations, irrigated crops and facilitated navigation. They also bore the brunt of a growing waste stream for thousands of years before legislation was passed to protect drinking water and aquatic wildlife from organic and chemical effluvia. Today’s government agencies oversee compliance, while an assortment of nonprofits conduct research, advocacy and remedial efforts. Earlier this year, the Lewes District Council in East Sussex, England, recognized the legal rights of the river Ouse. New Zealand’s Whanganui River had been given legal personhood in 2017, as had the Yamuna and Ganges in India, and Rio Atrato in Colombia. The Yurok Tribe of Northern California recognized the Klamath River as a person in 2019—a move that was partly inspired by the Ojibwe declaring in 2018 that manoomin (wild rice) “possesses inherent rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve, as well as inherent rights to restoration, recovery, and preservation.” Adirondack rivers have yet to receive similar legal status, but efforts are underway to see that they do.
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British military topographers depicted Lake George and the Champlain Valley during the French and Indian War. William Guy Wall and travel-writer John Agg explored the upper Hudson in 1820. Thomas Cole visited Lake George in 1826 and Schroon Lake in 1835. A historical marker claims he reached Long Lake. Charles Cromwell Ingham explored the Adirondacks with New York state geologist Ebenezer Emmons in 1837. Ingham’s painting of The Great Indian Pass may be the first exhibition picture produced “on the spot” in the High Peaks region, which beckoned other painters such as Asher B. Durand, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Winslow Homer, William Trost Richards and Georgia O’Keeffe. Art and science became bedfellows again when William James Stillman lured members of Boston’s elite Saturday Club to the Philosophers’ Camp at Follensby Pond in 1858. When Ralph Waldo Emerson bought a gun for the outing, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow chose to stay home.
While many plein-air painters are content with picturesque scenery, Anne Diggory mines the landscape for richer content. Subjects such as rocks, rivers, mountains and foliage become starting points for visual essays, which Diggory channels into symphonic orchestrations of marks, forms, light and space.
“I think that often when I’m in front of a landscape,” she explains. “I’m more overwhelmed by the elements that are there. I differentiate between, in musical terms, the composer versus the conductor. … The composer figures out what all the elements are, and how they are interrelated. I’m much more of a conductor back in the studio—trying to figure out if I need more percussion, more rhythm, or need to change the tempo. … That’s probably a truer representation of my [outdoor] experience … because I’m not blinded by what I’m looking at.”
Diggory’s pictures go far beyond optical reportage, to be read as visual prose poems—aesthetic experiences that celebrate her immersion in nature. As John Burroughs wrote, “I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.”
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Diggory started painting the Adirondacks 40 years ago, beginning with day trips from her home base in Saratoga Springs. “One of the first places I did a lot of painting was Chapel Pond,” she said. “That sense of cliff, water, vegetation, clouds going by … The more I poked into it, the more I found.” Unlike the legions of hikers who climb Adirondack High Peaks—who upon reaching a summit take a few selfies then start their descent, Diggory has a rule that when climbing a mountain, “I spend as much time on top of the mountain as I had spent getting up there.”
Thomas Cole first visited Lake George in 1826. He pressed deeper into the Adirondacks nine years later. “If the imagination is shackled, and nothing is described but what we see,” he cautioned, “seldom will anything truly great be produced either in Painting or Poetry.”

If you go
Follow the Water: Paintings by Anne Diggory: Art and Science of the Ausable Watershed Exhibit opens on July 3 and remains on view until July 27 at Keene Arts—10081 Route 73, Keene. Phone: 914-309-7095.
For more information, go to keenearts.com. For information about the Ausable Freshwater Center, visit ausableriver.org
Diggory traces her artistic lineage back to Hudson River School artists, by reinterpreting historic motifs of such artists as Asher B. Durand, John Frederick Kensett and David Johnson. Because 19th-century landscape painters mingled fact with fiction, locating these historic vistas required serious detective work.
Diggory sometimes seamlessly embeds photographs of a specific site within her painting of the same location. Interweaving momentary exposures with the accumulated data of countless hours of close observation disrupts our perception of time. The idea of landscape was described by a philosopher as expressing mankind’s desire to speed up or slow down the process of nature, and thus assume the role of time.
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Diggory has painted a variety of motifs within the Blue Line since 1990, before she zeroed in on the Ausable watershed 10 years ago. “I had a painting from Marcy. I had a painting from Chapel Pond. They were just Adirondacks,” she explains. “And then when I discovered the maps of the Ausable, what was [then] called then the Ausable River Association, now Ausable Freshwater Center, and all of a sudden, it’s like I’ve taken a DNA test of all my work and I said, geez, ‘these are related!’ … I became more deliberate. I started studying maps and realized there were sub-watersheds within that area … I hadn’t visited them all, so I needed to explore more. Maybe I had sold some pieces that represent a section and need to revisit the area. I decided to revisit Johns Brook and almost got lost when I was bushwhacking.”
Diggory is drawn to places such as Roaring Brook Falls, Hulls Falls, Jay Falls and the cascading flumes upstream from Wilmington, where fast-moving water wrestles with deadfall, boulders and stream beds, as it reshapes the terrain. For her, the difficulty of painting downstream views is that water flowing away into the distance appears to be running uphill. She is fascinated by “the power of the water to carve the landscape over time.”
“What I really enjoy is painting water coming toward me, and the space going back … usually from bridges or an elevated viewpoint where the water is actually going under me. There’s something magical about that tension between the two.”
The exhibition’s signature image is one of Diggory’s hybrid works, which places the viewer downstream of a rock torrent. “Ausable Twist” evokes 18th- and 19th-century topographical art with a contemporary eye. A photograph set seamlessly into the image calls attention to the passage of time, by juxtaposing the accumulation of painting hours with an instantaneous image of the very same location.
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While “Follow the Water” primarily showcases Diggory’s paintings, selected works by other artists in dialogue with the Ausable watershed are installed in an adjoining gallery. Each of these professional artists were invited to create a piece for the show about a dam removal site on the West Branch of the Ausable River known as Quarry Pool. Painter, master angler and Adirondack guide Rachel Finn hopes the exhibition will inspire visitors to “take some time to, especially if they live here … slow down a little and look at things and look at the river … I don’t mean you have to go fishing. Just take a walk by it.”
Other featured artists include Tim Fortune—a large-scale watercolor painter based in Saranac Lake—and Glens Falls-based Joy Muller-McCoola who is an artist using water, wool and stones to explore endangered waterways. Painter Kevin Raines has been involved in projects with UNESCO and The Nature Conservancy. He describes a visceral response when painting outdoors. “When I’m standing in nature, I get a feeling in my sternum. … scientist would look at the world a little differently … but eventually art and science merge.”
James Prosek is an award-winning Connecticut-based artist, author and naturalist, who first came to the Adirondacks decades ago. Like Diggory and Finn, he is a Yale graduate.
“My personal journey with art has become an effort to get the word out about the importance of preserving biodiversity and clean water—particularly cold running water in rivers and streams where these fish I love live,” Prosek said. “Historically, visual art has been very important in this way.”
Ausable Freshwater Center stewardship director Marque Moffett likewise sees “Follow the Water” as a way to “bring a wider audience to our work. … Science can seem daunting to a layperson … art and science as having roots in the same kind of ideas which are exploring, understanding and interpreting the world for other people. As artists and scientists, we have that in common.”
Pictured above: Anne Diggory’s painting “Ausable Twist,” a mixed media on canvas, 35 x 60 inches, is part of the “Follow the Water” exhibition. Image provided
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This article first appeared in a recent issue of Adirondack Explorer magazine.
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