Vermont born and raised, Zarabeth Duell grew up hiking and camping around the state – activities she has continued with her now-teenaged children. A structural engineer by training, she shifted her focus several years ago from designing buildings to creating art, finding her inspiration in the woods, waters, and hiking trails of the Green Mountain State. Through her MTN GRL STUDIO, she creates pen and ink prints, watercolors, earrings, and stickers. When she’s not in her studio or on the trail, Zarabeth is likely tending to the family’s large garden, cooking the things they grow there, or jumping into the river – which she has done daily, year-round, for more than 600 days now.
I’m a fourth generation Vermonter. I grew up in Monkton, and we’ve lived in Lincoln now for 17 years. I spent a lot of time outside as a kid – playing in the dirt, playing in the woods, hiking. My dad would take my sister and I up Mt. Mansfield for dad-daughter adventures. We spent a lot of time going to Vermont State Parks. We have gone to Lake Carmi State Park as a family for years. My dad grew up going there. It’s been 57 years that our family has been going collectively. Now my cousins and I all have kids, and we still go every Memorial Day weekend. We have a block of sites that we get every single year. We all go out in the canoe. We have these amazing potluck dinners. It’s definitely something that we all look forward to every year.
I went to UVM and got my degree in civil engineering and became a structural engineer. I worked as a structural engineer in Montpelier for 15 years. I designed and was the project engineer for many buildings all over the state and beyond. My specialty was wood construction. We designed high-end, residential buildings, commercial structures, bridges and everything in between. I was commuting to Montpelier from Lincoln, and it was just so far. I’d be gone by 7 in the morning and often be home by 6 or 7 at night. My husband was doing the morning shift and the dinner shift, and I felt like I was missing out on all of it.
I had started doing some artwork, primarily Long Trail profiles. I had created a poster – my Footpath poster – as part of a Call to Artists campaign from the Common Deer gift shop in Burlington. My poster design was selected as one of the finalists to be sold, and that really jump started the idea that maybe I could make this work. I worked for another year, then quit my engineering job six years ago this month.
Then life got in the way. My folks were both sick. My mom passed away in 2019. My dad has end stage Alzheimer’s and is in a facility in Burlington. It was a lot of caretaking for them, and just trying to manage that and our boys. That year, my husband and I went to seven funerals, and I think the next year we went to three or four. It was a mess of sadness and grief and caretaking. It’s so hard, this sandwich generation, where you’re caring for your kids, and you’re caring for your parents.
Leaving my job was really scary, but I’m so glad I did it. My last day at my engineering job was in December. Then January came, and I thought I had made a huge mistake because I lacked inspiration to create anything. I thought I was never going to have a good idea again, that I had used them all up. I am an artist of the Green Mountains. I hike and I am outside all summer. I am not much of a winter activities type person. There are no green mountains in the middle of winter. Every year, come January and February, I start to feel like there are no more ideas. But I have started to lean into that, to realize that it is OK to be restless and do other things around the house. I tend to hyper-fixate on something, I think a lot of creative types do that – you get this idea and you can’t get the work out fast enough, afraid you’re going to lose that thought, idea, inspiration. Creativity ebbs and flows, and over time that has become easier for me to understand.
When I first started doing artwork, I would mimic techniques I saw other artists do, and try to put my spin on the work. Within the last couple of years, I think I’ve finally started to develop who I am as an artist. Or I’m closer to that point. I’ve created a couple of posters. I’ve developed this layered paper technique that I feel is original. I think I’ve always been that crafty person. My mom was extremely crafty and creative, so I grew up in a house where any art supply that you wanted to have, any project that you wanted to do – you could do it.
My mom was a mathematician, a teacher, a naturalist, and a paper crafter. She loved folding paper. She liked making envelopes or those little pop-up cards. She loved that engineered paper form, and she always was cutting paper or working on various crafts. I thought she was crazy with all of that tedious paper cutting and folding, and now that is all I do. I go through so much paper – I’m cutting it and layering it, cutting out pine trees and the shape of Vermont. Right now, I’m creating these topographic maps. The USGS has 1 to 24,000 scale maps available online. I print out the area I want to feature and trace the contours. To get the features that I want, I will choose the contour interval and cut each contour out of watercolor paper, then stack and glue them together, so they become three dimensional. I glue all the layers together, then I hand-stitch the Long Trail or add other prominent features onto it.
When I was in high school, one of the requirements was a class called Vermont Heritage. In that class, my final project was a report on the history of the Long Trail. I also made a topographic map out of cardboard of the Long Trail. It was the section that I love the most now, from the Appalachian Gap to Lincoln Gap. It’s on this 3-by-4-foot panel of plywood, and I cut out corrugated cardboard to make the contours. It’s funny that I’m doing the same thing that I did in high school. I’ve circled way back around to that piece.
As an artist I’m always trying to emulate the stacks of mountains you see when you’re on the summit. I create layered paper watercolors to try to achieve more depth than just a landscape painting. Each layer is painted, and cut, and then glued together to form the finished piece. Most pieces I create have five or six layers to them. I really like the look of a raw torn edge of paper, so I float the art on a mat board inside a deeper frame. Recently I’ve been playing around with mounting the layers on a wood panel.
I also have three hiking posters that I have developed. The first one, which I did back in 2017, is titled Footpath and was a relief linoleum print. I did an edition of 125, and I hand printed them. I inked them, and I didn’t have a press, so I was pressing them with a wooden spoon in my kitchen. The entire house was covered in wet 18-by-24-inch pieces of paper. It was three rolls of paper, and I was so worried it was going to be a flop. I had spent $500 on paper, and that was such a huge investment. But that really was the kickoff. The second and third posters I did were created in pen and ink. The second poster is titled Shelters. There are 12 divisions of the Long Trail, and I took one shelter from each section. I tried to pick the most architecturally unique structure and drew that up and then arranged them on a poster. The third poster features the current, still standing, publicly accessible fire towers of Vermont. I offer all three of them as a screen print. Once the original hand printed Footpath edition sold out, I had them screen printed locally. When I completed the second and third, those were screen printed as well.
The Green Mountains and the Long Trail are such an inspiration. With most of my art, I’m trying to mimic the feeling you get when you’re either on the top of a mountain or you’re walking through the spruces or you get to a little babbling brook. I’ve always wanted to find a perfume that reminds me of that sort of alpine scent – where you’re walking through spruces, and you can smell the mosses and the lichen. About four years ago, I stopped along a trail with that scent and I started collecting – little branches and moss and lichen, spruce, dirt, and rocks – and I soaked it all in alcohol and created this tincture and bottled it up for my holiday markets that year. People can close their eyes, and that scent reminds them of their favorite Vermont hike.
The name MTN GRL was supposed to be a placeholder, and it’s just stuck. It describes who I am. I am MTN GRL STUDIO. On social media, I don’t just share my art. I share my hiking, camping, cooking from scratch, jumping in the river. I jump in the river every day, year round. November 18th marked the 600th day in a row dipping into a Vermont body of water, be it a river, lake or pond.
It started with a group of friends. We decided to jump in the river once a month for a year. After the year, I decided I wanted to make it a daily habit. I’d always gone into the river early in the spring. It was such a thrill, such a shock, but I felt so much better after. There was a clarity after I got over the shock of the freezing cold water. There was a reset. While there are days that I definitely do not want to go, I’ve never regretted it once I had done it. I’m going to keep doing it until it doesn’t serve me well anymore, I just haven’t reached that point yet. It still provides that daily reset. I’m definitely an overthinker, and this forces me to clear my thoughts and just focus on the sound of the rushing water, my breathing, and the cold water, if only for a few minutes.