Co-founder of Chelsea Green Publishing draws inspiration from Brueghel, surviving

By Paul Bean

Collages by Ian Baldwin, a Hardwick artist and co-founder of Chelsea Green Publishing, burst with color and life at Front Seat Coffee on Main Street, where they will be displayed through December 31. 

Inspired by a near-death experience in 2024, Baldwin’s work celebrates human connection, nature, and resilience, drawing inspiration from masters like Bruegel and Thiebaud to craft vibrant tributes to life’s journey.

“Ian’s art is a celebration of life’s journey and the moments and memories we create and celebrate along the way,” said Alison Despathy of Danville, who attended the exhibit opening earlier this month. “It was wonderful to connect with Ian and Margo and their community of family and friends who came out to witness this next evolution of Ian’s life journey through art and this world. Ian’s work and expressions are inspiring, hopeful and connect us with the natural world.”

Baldwin is a co-founder of Chelsea Green Publishing, an independent Vermont-based publisher specializing in books on sustainable living, progressive politics, and environmental issues. Established in 1984 by Ian and his wife Margo Baldwin from their home in Chelsea, the company began with just three titles and has grown to over 400 books. Ian, who had prior experience in publishing, served as CEO until the mid-1990s, after which he transitioned to pursuing a career as an artist and other publishing ventures. 

Following a 2024 stint in the hospital, determined to get back to his craft, Baldwin found himself a studio within walking distance from his home. He works with simple materials. I recently sat down with Baldwin prior to his exhibit’s opening, to learn about his stint as an artist and what inspired his most recent work and what got him into collages as opposed to paintings. 

“In 2024 I almost died during a diabetic hypoglycemic episode. Almost. Something reasserted itself while I was hospitalized: I learned I was not ready to go. I decided to resume making art, this time without the mess of brushes, solvents, tubes of paints, knives, primers, and canvases instead using only colored paper, scissors, and glue. Ready to begin, I cried out for a studio and my neighbor Harry Miller provided a small space at the back of what used to be the town library. I began to work in November.” 

Ian Baldwin’s Collage “Winter” on the left was inspired by Peter Brugel the Elder’s 16th century painting,  Hunters in the Snow [right], often referred to as simply, Winter.

“There are a number of artists to whom I pay tribute in that. The ‘Winter’ is exactly similarly titled to Peter Bruegell The Elder’s ‘Winter’ [Hunters in the Snow] inspired it. If you go look at Bruegel’s Winter you will see those same three trees heading down a hill. The same little fire. Not exactly… The same little cabin. In the distance I have an owl. He had crows. I realized, ‘you’re doing winter in Vermont. You can’t do winter in 16th century Belgium…The two don’t compute. Lots of skaters… Well we don’t skate on open ice in Vermont because we get too much snow. So it flowed out. But it was inspired [by Winter]…”

Top Left, Coffee Clatch and Top Right, Nancy’s Choice, both by Ian Baldwin. Bottom is Wayne Thiebault’s, Four Ice Cream Cones as Baldwin’s inspiration.

“Similarly Coffee Clatch. Wayne Thiebault is a San Francisco-based painter who did desserts and things in delis. Their colors were so playful and joyful. So it [Coffee Clatch] was a riff on Wayne Thiebault that I did with coffee cups. But as I did it, I realized ‘oh you’re talking about Human Beings…they all look different on the outside.’ And they’re different on the inside as well, physically. But they are all receptacles for coffee, which is enjoyed… by everyone!”

Much of our conversation surrounding his art was about his life-long desire, as not just an artist, but as a human, to relate with all types of humans despite potential differences in social, cultural, ethnic, and political backgrounds. 

In conversation with Baldwin you will quickly realize that he is well traveled, well read, and is deeply knowledgeable on the geopolitical history of the United States and its role as a regional and global power over the past 70 plus years. Baldwin’s collages seek to express his perspective on the current state of humanity, his own evolution and experiences through his life, and his relationship with an ever changing world. 

Baldwin: “This is the danger of ‘the right’ and why I have never really been a ‘conservative,’ much less on the right. I’ve merely reached what I think is a middle ground…”“There is a danger of being hyde bound or being cut off and unopened to other beings. There is that latent danger that place takes total precedence…It may be in the Native American societies that were all over the continent that exchanged with each other over time. They wondered. They were less sedentary than we are…There was an appreciation and tolerance for other people and other places.”

Bean: “You know, that is something I have definitely struggled with as a ‘small c conservative,’ which is, like, hey I love and appreciate people from all over the world. I appreciate different perspectives, religions, colors of skin, food…but then at the same time it feels like I am closing my heart in a sense because we ‘gotta stop all this immigration and just letting people in willy nilly.’ And then what ‘the left’ does with that is well now ‘you’re a racist, you’re a this, you’re a that,’ and it’s like, well, I am not any of those things, I simply just want to have my own version of what I appreciate about everyone else. I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

Baldwin: “It’s completely hypocrisy… The real reason [they’re doing this], and I think you probably realize is, how do we grind down this thing called France. Or this thing called Spain?…How do we grind down these entities that think so highly of themselves? Well? Let’s bring them in from North Africa. Nigeria. Syria. Let’s just bring them in and slowly, upheaval the population. 

So you have one of the four greatest cities in the world, London, which is now run by a Muslim. This is the strategy. This is the bankers. This is the big transnational corporations, and all their advisors in media, including Hollywood. This is how they want us to go. To lose all rootedness. I mean the immigrant is already uprooted, so if he or she has no sense of place, to cary with them – their sense of place, but it is lost in a generation…

I understand. I’ve been to London. I know it a little bit… there’s been a huge expression of uprising [in London] an expression of dread, you know, I’m not ready to lose my history. I am not ready to erase my identity and go to klouse’s utopia. You will own nothing. You will have no obligations. And you will be happy. I am not ready for that.”

Baldwin’s Collage titled “Celebration” 

Most of our interview was on Baldwin’s back porch on the common in Craftsbury. Together we drank coffee on his back porch and enjoyed the early fall vibrant sunlight.

“I did all the work in the tiny space in the back of what used to be the library on the common. Do you want to see it?” remarked Baldwin. Of course I did We walked not more than 100 yards away to the back door of an old library on Craftsbury Common that used to be part of Sterling College.

There, Baldwin gave me the grand tour of his studio, showing me where he kept the precious thick card-stock paper used in his collages. He showed me some of his earlier pieces, before he discovered that it was necessary to use the special card-stock paper, ordered from a special Blick catalog. His early pieces were inperfect because he did not have the right paper and when the glue dried the paper would quickly wrinkle and well, just not come out right. 

Making these kinds of collages requires a lot more skill than just a little experience with a pair of scissors and glue… It requires knowledge about specific glues, specific paper, and how to cut said paper. However Baldwin says, this specialized level of skill and knowledge pales in comparison to painting.

Following another health scare and hospital stint in earlier this spring, where Baldwin told me he had ‘surrendered to death,’ he found himself returning to his Vermont home with a newfound motivation to express himself fortified by this notion that ‘he was just not done yet.’

“I thought, you need to go back and express yourself in a simpler way than you have in the past, and just work like Mattise did as an old man in his eighties,” he remarked. “With a pair of scissors. Some paper. And some glue!..It’s not that simple by the way. 

“But, If you’ve been a painter and you’ve worked with oil paints, there’s a lot to deal with, you know. Solids, paints, pallet knives, all different kinds of brushes, all different kinds of surfaces. All different kinds of primers. Etcetera, etcetera. It’s too much for me now.”

Artist Henri Matisse used two simple materials, white paper and gouache, to create similar style works.

“So, I went to work. And I noticed the primary emotion was the joy of the color and the shapes and the forms. And I wasn’t thinking about geoengineering (he laughed) and other miseries… I don’t advocate not to think about those things. But this is what spontaneously came out. And after a little bit I said ‘Ian commit yourself to getting something done by next fall, and putting up an exhibit at Tobin’s place (Front Street Coffee)…”

Baldwin and I both represent the organization, Our Geoengineering Age, of which Baldwin is a co-founder. Typically when meeting with Ian, geoengineering is the topic of discussion. It was a blessing to spend time with this man and discuss his artistic pursuits. 

The exhibit is open through December 31, from 7 AM- 3 PM everyday. 

Below is the announcement of Ian Baldwin’s exhibit opening as well as his artists description of the exhibit and background:

I began my life as an artist late, at age 56, having opted to take an oil paintingintensive with the artist and filmmaker Clifford West at the AVA Gallery & Art Center in Lebanon, NH. During that first week of painting with oils, my muse, whose existence and power I never really suspected, seized hold of me: I found myself involuntarily hallucinating as I drove home at night and lay wide awake in bed while swaths of intense and gorgeous color swirled before me. 

That was exactly 30 years ago, in the fall of 1995. I continued to be mentored by Clifford, and was taught by many other artists associated with AVA, in whose multi-storied building I rented a wide variety of studio spaces over the next dozen years. I drew in a variety of media, working with models provided by AVA, using charcoal and pencils, chalk and oil pastels, inks and brushes, and learned to make monotypes. Clifford taught us to stretch and size large canvases using boiled rabbit skin glue. One of my canvases from that time sits on the back wall of Front Seat Coffee. 

In 1997-98 my wife Margo and I took our two young children, Angus and Rosie, for an academic year in Oaxaca, Mexico. There, a new world of art making and culture opened up when wandering the city on foot on a beautiful fall afternoon, I passed by the open courtyard of the Taller de Rufino Tamayo. I walked in and enrolled in etching and lithography workshops for a pittance. Within days I fell in love with the Mexican way of making art: conviviality reined under a bare-assed sun. I participated in several group exhibits with etchings and lithographs. 

When we returned to the Upper Valley (central VT and NH) I was determined to start a printmaking studio modeled on the Rufino Tamayo experience in Oaxaca. 

My chance soon came when White River Junction’s old Tip Top Bakery building was bought and renovated during 1999-2000, mainly into artists’ studios and workshops. I rented the first newly available large space and secured etching and lithography presses, all in good working order, along with large Bavarian stones. With Vermont printmaker Brian Cohen and two local local artist friends I next formed a nonprofit group, naming it the Two Rivers Printmaking Studio (TRPS), and opened it up for membership in 2001. I participated in drypoint, etching, relief etching, woodcarving, lithography, and other workshops in the ensuing years and left others to run the studio. 

Which they did. In 2026, TRPS will celebrate its 25th anniversary. 

In the 2000s I studied oil painting and drawing technique with the artists Susan Walp and later, Peter Granucci. The tension between working freely, a gift Clifford West helped me develop and slowly understand, and rigorously with a sense of command, which Susan and Peter helped me gain, had developed inside me. How to combine these essential qualities in an original way? From the start I’d been attracted to representational and abstract rendering of form, line, color, and shape. 

Each approach to art making turned out to be equally demanding: I could spend months finishing an abstract or a representational work. 

The question of what made art notable, what lay at its heart, prodded and stymied me. Jackson Pollack never learned to be a draftsman, per se, but was an undeniably great painter. Similarly, great draftsmen could be uninspiring artists. What was the magic? The daemon of art is extremely hard to pin down. For a few months late in the first decade of the 2000s I quit painting. Then, on Clifford’s encouragement I rented a large studio at AVA and did something new. I painted large acrylic narrative works on paper that covered the studio walls. Although I never exhibited these (they remain rolled up in our attic), they freed me up to continue working again in variety of media. 

In 2018 Margo and I packed up moved from the Upper Valley to Craftsbury Common. The move involved a massive downsizing and exhausted me. Fortunately my friend Bente Torjusen, Clifford’s widow and director of the AVA Gallery, introduced me to Paul Gruhler in East Craftsbury. To me, Paul was a different kind of artist. He worked with purely abstract forms, using saturated colors. Unlike me, he had spent most of his adult life doing art. Over the next few years we became friends, and I absorbed his work and was inspired by his example. 

In 2024 I almost died during a diabetic hypoglycemic episode. Almost. Something reasserted itself while I was hospitalized: I learned I was not ready to go. I decided to resume making art, this time without the mess of brushes, solvents, tubes of paints, knives, primers, and canvases instead using only colored paper, scissors, and glue. Ready to begin, I cried out for a studio and my neighbor Harry Miller provided a small space at the back of what used to be the town library. I began to work in November. 

Nine months later these 24 pieces on exhibit at Tobin Porter’s gallery space are the result. They reveal my continuing fascination with color and form, abstraction as well as representation. For me, no matter what kind of art you make, mystery lies at its heart and makes it ripple.