For most of his nearly 67 years (his birthday is on Sunday), Gary Hamel was among the Upper Valley’s most prolific and committed visual artists.

But for a long stretch, he was forced to stop working by a health issue that affected his eyesight. After 11 years, Hamel found a work-around and another five years after that his first gallery show opened last week at the Main Street Museum in White River Junction.

The show, titled “D’Garyotypes,” a play on Daguerreotype, an early photographic process, features images made from Hamel’s vast collection of vintage photographs. He has a lot of work in progress, but the 24 pieces in this show hold a special place.

“I wanted to show those collages first, because that’s where the process started,” Hamel said in an interview in his studio in Canaan.

The show marks a public return of one of the most deeply rooted Upper Valley artists. Hamel was a year old in 1959, when his parents moved from Massachusetts to Orange, which then had a population of 68, to take up farming, gardening and, in his mother’s case, traditional New England crafts. His work, whether in paintings, prints, collages or assemblage, knits together his interests in local and New England history.

“He’s a purist when it comes to his art,” Lisa Rogak, a longtime Upper Valley writer who moved to Canaan five years ago and is a friend of Hamel’s, said in a phone interview.

Hamel lives without a phone or a computer, and so has a complete focus on his work and the world around him. His studio, in downtown Canaan, is a four-minute drive from his house.

“I don’t know anybody else who has arranged his life to such an extent that his art comes first,” said Rogak, who put Hamel in touch with Main Street Museum founder and director David Fairbanks Ford.

The work at the Main Street Museum is all of a piece. Hamel tends to work at an idea, turning it over and playing with it, until he has a body of pieces to show. The 24 collages now on view are of a piece. He takes photographs from his collection and enlarges them with a photocopier to create images he can cut out and juxtapose. Once he assembled them to his liking, he put each one behind glass on a framing of boards. The results are a mix of light and dark, a kind of history recorded, forgotten, then dimly remembered, not as it actually happened.

“What I wanted is for the viewer to go between the images and make a story,” Hamel said. Each viewer would likely conjure a different story, because of the differing associations they’d bring to each piece, he said.

Nearly all of the photographs are of people unknown to Hamel, though one of them includes his mother. One collage features a cutout of a serious looking woman superimposed on a background photograph of a man in a car, a Model T, perhaps. The man is looking back over his shoulder toward the woman. She seems decisive, but has she decided to leave with the waiting man, or to stay where she is? To me, this tension seemed unresolved, but as Hamel suggested, another viewer could see it differently. Hamel is inviting us to invent the relationships between the figures in his work.

In another, he has placed a figure with its face faded or smudged out over an old railroad document with a stamp on it bearing George Washington’s head. History is obscure to us, it seems to say, even when we peer closely at it.

When I started writing about art in 2005, Hamel’s work was everywhere. His paintings were richly detailed with animals, historical figures and the unmistakable New England landscape. Seeing a show of his work was like visiting a different world. Suddenly, that world was foreclosed.

In 2008, Hamel was quarantined at home for a month with a case of shingles that affected his eyes. Friends hung plastic bags of groceries on the door of his house.

Once he got better, his vision was still blurred and doubled and shadowed. While trying to paint, he’d make a line, turn to load his brush with paint then turn back to the canvas in some confusion.

“I couldn’t tell what was the line I had just drawn and what was the double vision,” Hamel said. In frustration, he just stopped making art.

Hamel has been a creative soul from the beginning, when he sat at his mother’s knee while she learned and practiced the crafts that occupied the second half of her life, and gardened and pruned fruit trees with his father. Though he found work at Taylor Brothers Farm and Garfield Smokehouse in Meriden and Riverview Farm in Plainfield to keep himself afloat, his spirit slowly sank.

“I was getting further and further into depression,” Hamel said. In 2019, “the weekend before Christmas, I couldn’t get out of bed.”

He grabbed himself by the collar and told himself, “You have to do something that makes you happy,” he said. He went to Duke’s, the art supply shop in Lebanon, and bought some canvas. He stretched it and on Christmas Day, he dug out an easel and plunked it into the snow near Cardigan Mountain State Park.

“It wasn’t a great painting in any respect, but I was happy,” he said.

In February 2020, he went to Jocelyn Barney, who operates Barney Insurance in Canaan, in search of a studio space. He works in a small studio next door to the insurance agency with windows that look out on the intersection of Routes 4 and 118.

His aim, at the time, was to see what he was capable of. He found that his ongoing vision issues were related to his depth of field, which made it hard for him to focus between a distant subject and the canvas.

“I couldn’t make that adjustment, that focus,” he said. “I could do it at most for 10 minutes or so.”

But he found that if he took a photograph and blew it up, then placed it on the canvas, “I could paint for hours.”

The collages in the Main Street Museum came directly out of that experience. Hamel has been collecting vintage photographs for years, usually from thrift or antique shops. On a shelf in his studio are pizza boxes labeled “Men,” “Farming,” “Children,” “Family,” “Landscape,” each one full of black and while photographs of uncertain age and provenance.

“They feel like abandoned people,” Hamel said. “I can’t give them back their identities,” he added, “but I can give them maybe some dignity in a piece of artwork.”

Arranged around his studio were several works in progress, including a series of small monoprints. Hamel estimated that he has “several hundred” works that he’s pushing toward completion.

Two other shows are coming up. From Aug. 8 to 10, Shaker Hill Bed & Breakfast in Enfield will show a series of 46 landscapes in oil of locations along the Eastern Seaboard. And on Sept. 13, las vive, the Enfield dining club, will host a Henry David Thoreau-themed dinner featuring Thoreau-inspired work from Hamel.

Hamel’s 11-year hiatus from making art has given him a sense of urgency, Rogak said.

“I think it’s why he’s so focused,” she said. “He lost those years. He can’t get those back.”

“D’Garyotypes” is on view at the Main Street Museum through Aug. 29 and is viewable on Friday evenings from 5 to 8 or so, and by appointment. To set up an appointment, text 802-356-2776.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.

Before the lens

“Flipping the Camera: The Makers’ Menagerie,” an exhibit highlighting work that the team at White River Junction’s JAM (Junction Arts & Media) has been cooking up in their spare time, is on view through Aug. 29 at Norwich Public Library. An opening reception is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. this Friday. Viewers can expect a range of work from prints to sculpture to video, and even an eclectic vending machine. For more information, visit norwichlibrary.org.

— Marion Umpleby

Truth and beauty

Upper Valley artist Lucinda Herlihy’s exhibit of oil paintings, entitled “Truth is Beauty II,” is on view in the Mezzanine Gallery at the Norman Williams Public Library in Woodstock through Aug. 31. For more information, visit normanwilliams.org.

— Marion Umpleby