By Susanne Washburn
Photography by Hubert Schriebl
Tradition, in many different guises, is of genuine moment to this pair. Elizabeth and Thomas Torak, husband-and-wife artists, make their home in Pawlet, which, like much of Vermont, has a long lineage of painters. Itinerant portraitists and stencilers of the early and mid-1800s were the first. Toward the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, the area acquired something of an art-colony reputation as visiting painters drew their peers from afar to (literally) greener pastures. In the latter 20th century, the Toraks' home territory lay claim to luminaries like Ogden Pleissner, celebrant of outdoor sporting scenes, and Jay Connaway, creator of large Vermont landscapes.
On their Pawlet hilltop endlessly redecorated by its sky dome, the Toraks have a handsome shake-roof home, built in 1985, which now incorporates separate, adjoining studios-both north-lit from on high. There, each painter labors, sometimes meets with classes and, more unusually, prepares paints and canvases with methods that originated with Jan van Eyck in the 15th century and achieved their apex with Peter Paul Rubens in the 17th.
The couple, aligned in their profession, came to it by different routes-each with unusual stages. Elizabeth, knowing early on that art was her goal, left home in Princeton, New Jersey, to live with other family members in Manhattan in order to attend private school there, and, most important, to be able to continue year-round her classes at the Art Students League, where she had begun summer studies at 15. Elizabeth's was an academically oriented family (her grandfather, Columbia University Professor Isidor Isaac Rabi won the 1944 Nobel Prize in Physics). In preference to attending art school, she pursued a degree at the University of Chicago.
