Hiding in plain sight, Rick Rogers’ name and four of his photographs adorn an outside wall at the old City Hall at 412 Main St. in Beacon. Up the street, a more subtle wood panel marks the entrance to his cluttered studio beneath the Ron and Ronnie Sauers Bridge that spans Fishkill Creek. From a wooden deck, the infrastructure frames the falls and water roars past his door.
Rogers holds a perennial open studio for visitors who encounter his work online or are enticed by the sandwich board sign at the top of the stairs.
“I usually get 35 to 40 people on a good Second Saturday, sometimes more with perfect weather,” he says. “People say it’s a great view, especially in the summer, when the trees are lush and you have no idea you’re in Beacon.”
Four color contrasts from his informal, long-running bottle series are hanging in a group show at Big Mouth Coffee Roasters on Main Street through the end of this month. One offers an impressionistic rendition of three vessels that evoke vintage blue bottles, with enough white space and strong brush strokes to keep things interesting. Some serve as vases; the pointillist flowers burst like fireworks.
At Draught Industries, five pieces showcase a portion of his breadth, including a minimalist landscape of rolling hills dotted with red-and-white houses, rendered without detail. Another bottle/vase still life with flowers and sharper angles exposes more wood grain than usual (he handcrafts the frames and painting surfaces at the studio).
The cracked abstract with red blotches scarring the blurry blue and white horizontal stripes looks like the result of a thousand cuts. The deep red bleeds over ill-defined lines, creating pink and purple accents at the margins.
Another panel, “Beers of Beacon, N.Y.,” arranges 20 photos of pints from above. The circles are similar, but the contents vary from overflowing to needing a refill. A large painting of a glass of beer features prominent drips.
His output includes embellished stick figures, painted mirrors with uplifting slogans and what he calls “word art” with quotes from artists such as Monet’s quip: “I’m not performing miracles. I’m using up and wasting a lot of paint.”
In conceptual pieces like “Killing Time,” a wood-handled knife sticks out from an old-fashioned circular clock with blood oozing down its face. In his studio, a cellphone hangs off the silver cradle of a rotary phone.
Rogers merges creativity with his passion for bicycling. In the outdoor exhibit on Main Street, Bikin’ Beacon: Have Bike, Will Travel, three of the large-format photos pose his ride at Long Dock Park, the dummy light and the foot of Mount Beacon.
The lone action shot provides an over-the-handlebar perspective as he cruises down the double yellow line of a deserted Main Street in the dead of night.
At 73, Rogers wakes at 3 or 4 each morning, “the time I used to roll in,” he says. When the weather thaws, he plans to ride to and across the George Washington Bridge and back.
As a youngster, he attended the University Settlement camp on Route 9D, founded by a labor union in New York City. He kept returning to the area and, after retiring from the Westchester County Parks Department in 2010, he and his wife ended up in Beacon because “we wanted to move to a place we could go without driving a car for days,” he says.
But they live in an apartment on Main Street that lacks parking, so “sometimes we forget where we left the car and have to trudge around, going to the three or four usual spots. That can be a hassle in the snow.”
