An Article from The Woodstock Times, August 28th, 2013
By Paul Smart

Anthropoliths

Harry Matthews, whose standing stone 'Anthropoliths' will be showing at the Mountain Top Arboretum in the Greene County mountain town of Tannersville into the deepest color of the coming autumn, started his art after hiking through the fields of cairns and dolmens of the Celtic world. At first his practice was a meditation, finding the balance point between stones found in his old haunts throughout the Adirondacks. Eventually, they grew tall, straight… four or five rocks high. And Harry moved to the Catskills.

He’s now settled in the Kiskatom area of Catskill on a property of rolling meadows and looming hills and forests, surrounded by mountains and a bordering creek. And gardening… in addition to his music-making (including instrument invention), writing, and estate renovations.

The anthropoliths morphed last summer as part of a remarkable sculpture show in Athens, where they were held together with steel… and superbly placed overlooking the Hudson River and City of Hudson in the distance.

Now, Matthews’ works are situated amongst sublime mountain gardens overlooked my the high Catskills… and stone walls of nearby Onteora Park. It’s a stunning setting… made more sublime, and manageable somehow, by these new works… standing tall and silent, gnarled and temporary, yet somehow as eternal as all in view.

“The more I create the more my understanding of balance, of gravity, grows,” says the all-around artist my son Milo refers to as “Uncle Hootie.” “Eventually I found that the more I relied on their perchings the less room I had for their movement. To me they are ancient, petrified, yet free, emblematic remnants of an older time, ever graceful in their re-articulated weight.” 

And also beautiful. And awesome in the various levels of talents, natural combination of the simple and nature’s complexities, and the epiphany-inducing, involved in their creation… and fixing.

To think, he does this on commission, too, for anyone’s garden... or arboretum.

The Arboretum Rocks!  Anthropoliths: The Stone Sculpture of Harry Matthews, up through October 14^th with a Sunday, September 1 artists reception, Mountaintop Arboretum, Rt. 23C and Maude Adams Rd., Tannersville, NY 12485, 518 589-3903. www.mtarboretum.org.