Alice Lived Here: Each Artist Has A Time In Woodstock, A Brief Time In Alice Jaffe's Woodstock-..

I first met Alice on a freezing cold winter's day. I had moved to Woodstock that Fall to fulfill a photograph gallery internship at the Center for Photography in 2001. I knew I could photograph a little, paint a little, write a little, and like most comers to Woodstock was at a transition point in my life. Alice was at a critical in her life. She and her long term significant other Bill were struggling on their way home from the health food store with groceries, shopping cart stuck in the snow and ice, he trying to free the cart, she sitting despondently on the snowbank looking quite lost. I stopped, put the groceries and the cart in my Jeep, helped them in and drove them home. That is the way many Woodstock friendships begin. In Woodstock people just automatically help each other. That has happened always, even before the almost 125 years as Americas first artist colony, Byrdcliffe into the early beginnings of the farms and village people whose descendent still welcome creative people. Alice was one of those people. Her stories will be told, I am confident, by her loving daughters. They will know the story deeper and longer and with greater emotions and complexity. I am not writing her life. I am just writing her time in Woodstock during the time I was there.photography copyright Donna White-Davis 2003-2009