Back in the '90s, I gave some seminars in art and literature at Buckingham Friends School. One of the many fine students I met was Alex Cohen, now 24 and currently an articulate third year student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
      Last year, Alex read "Travels With Charlie" by John Steinbeck, in which he drove across America in a modified pickup truck that was both movable home and writing studio to observe, converse with, and rediscover America. Alex was excited by the idea and fantasized about "art born from adventure."
       Fantasy soon became reality. He bought a 1988 United States Mail truck on eBay, painted it green, and converted it into a traveling studio that he calls the Magpie Mobile Mercantile. He obtained licenses to peddle in Buckingham and Newtown, and plans on getting them for Wrightstown, Doylestown, Solebury, Tinicum, and New Hope.
      Alex wants to "have the nutrients of my studio reach me while I travel away from it." To him the difference between brief outings to paint and having a moving studio "is the feeling of ambassadorship." On short trips, he feels like a visitor whereas with his traveling studio, he sees himself as "an ambassador bearing all of his efforts along with him and establishing a complex dialogue with the landscape."
       Never far from his mind thinking up this enterprise was the "antique mercantile fringe." Intrigued by the history of ads and small business trade with its door-to-door salesmen, and carnival hawkers, Alex wanted the project to be entertaining and "not just a cold transaction."
        He wanted his business to border on "eccentricity and antiquity, hopefully (harkening back) in a playful way to the times when folks provided for themselves in risky and inventive ways that made life interesting. I wanted to be a vagabond artist in the spirit of Steinbeck, in the style of the old snake-oil hucksters and in the tradition of the Bucks County landscape painters."
       For Alex, this meant involving himself with unfamiliar aspects of life such as auctions, permits, insurance, bureaucracy, truck driving, gallery presentation, and much more. "I had to dig deep into the depths of practicality and legality and walk the detailed course of the uncategorized entrepreneur." After all this the art mobile has finally been born.
       Alex, an avid bird watcher, says the name Magpie was inspired by the bird, "a harlequin marauder who has a peculiar affinity for things that sparkle and shine. Often mentioned dubiously as the theiving Magpie, the bird collects all these wonderful ornate treasures and displays them in his trove. The landscape painter is all too akin to this marvelous creature."       
        Alex loves landscape painting and his description of it is astute, reflecting a profoundly mature understanding for one so tender in years. "I adore landscape painting in observation and in practice. It is an art form that channels a wonder and conversation with the environment. It is reflective and experiential and transportive, but often it seems that it is looked upon in a passive way that it does not deserve. I think that those who take the physical landscape for granted are wont to do the same with the artistic interpretation.
       "The dynamism of capturing the beauty of a setting and its relation to the artist is too easily received as quaint or restful. The landscape for the artist, while it may be relaxing, should be anything but restful. Instead, it is an experience charged with the beautiful and impossible qualities of perspective, color, composition, and a plethora of informal relations of nature, society and philosophy. By creating a mobile studio and gallery I thought I might overcome the passive perception."
        Alex is greatly attached to Bucks County where he was born and raised, saying it "has been such a wonderful mother to art, spawning a host of original and brilliant landscape painters and caring for them with extraordinary subject matter. I am deeply indebted to the artistic heritage of Bucks County and wanted to be as much a part of its continuing vigor as I can. This project would give me a chance to really see my county in focus and to be closer to that artistic heritage as well."
      Alex has interned at WHYY's "Radio Times" and worked as art director for Seeds of Peace Camp. Also to be seen in the Magpie are beautifully designed handbags recycled from scraps of fine French fabric by Emily Falk, a BFS alumna. Emily just graduated from Brown University and will be working at an organization for women's health issues under a Fulbright.
        So keep your eyes peeled for this fine young artist and his big green truck this summer as you travel about Bucks County.
       Jan Lipes is a Bucks County Painter whose work may be seen at the Gratz Gallery in New Hope and at www.gratzgallery.com direct comments to jlipes@voicenet.com