Art Beat: A life alive with color
by Trish Crapo, Greenfield Recorder
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
(Published in print: Thursday, February 18, 2016)
Turning onto Bascom Road off Lampblack Road in Greenfield and winding your way down the curving road into Gill is like driving back in time.
The narrow road, tunneled with trees, opens surprisingly into a broad expanse where two traditional New England farmhouses with barns, fields and pastures sit diagonally across the road from each other. At the second farm, two donkeys gaze with curiosity over the fence, while cattle search for grass under the snow with their noses.
People sometimes call the area “The Hidden Valley,” says weaver Kathy Litchfield, who lives and works in one of the farmhouses in Bascom Hollow. She and her husband, Ivan Ussach, work together with two other families to raise vegetables, cattle, pigs and chickens. And when she’s not doing farm chores, Litchfield is in her second- floor studio carrying on the centuries-old tradition of weaving clothing and kitchen linens by hand on wooden looms.
Litchfield first encountered weaving as a nine-year-old girl on a field trip to Old Sturbridge Village. She fell in love, she says.
