Greg Bernhardt is an artisanal cheesemaker at Blue Ledge Farm, which he and his wife, Hannah Sessions, began ten years ago. Beginning as a painter, having graduated from Bates College in 1999 as a double major in Studio Art and English(Creative Writing Concentration), I sought to have a creative, yet hands-on, life. Deciding to work with the land and animals in Addison County, VT, was the practical foundation of it all. Making Artisanal and Farmstead Cheese would be the central and creative focus of our life. It is out of this life we’ve created for ourselves, that these painting came about.

There is a solitude in a cheesemaker’s life which is similar to that of a painter even. And I have tried to create in these still-lives of “Crottina” the same quietness that I experience in the cheese cave. With light and texture, my aim was to give a visceral account of the cheese itself by contrasting it with the table and the background. I wanted these “Crottina” to feel alive, which in microbial terms they are. The idea that each cheese has a life of its own, its own destination, has always fascinated me, as I see hundreds if not thousands of cheeses at any given moment around me. I wanted to isolate just a few away from their usual context, their cave, and create a space in which their meaning could even border on the conceptual and abstract. I wanted there to be a possibility even for a narrative to be drawn out of these images, from there relationships to one another, to their shadows, and to the light which illuminates them.