Someone recently asked if my compositions are based on real places, and are they literal depictions of that place. They all originate from an actual place, but I edit the composition significantly, taking a lot out of the scene, and sometimes putting things in. While the origin of the composition is a real place, the process of imagining a new place, based on that setting, happens continually from original charcoal sketch through to completed painting.
While finishing this piece recently, I was thinking about that question…and how imagination comes into the process. As the piece neared completion, I began considering titles. A few came, and were scrapped. I had some Bunny Wailer playing, and his “Dream Land” came on. Great song. And that settled it. “Dreamland” 54 x 48
The section of my New Hampshire town, where my house sits, is surrounded by hundreds of miles of stone walls. Many of these walls line the roads we drive along…relics of the old farm roads of a century ago. But most of the stone walls that exist here extend beyond these roads, and disappear into the thousands of acres of woods that make up the majority of our town.
If you trek into those woods, following one of these walls, it seems that if you just keep following, you’re bound to end somewhere, or maybe back where you started. But they seem to never end…always connected to another wall, and that wall to another, and on and on. But occasionally you do find the end, and it’s those ends that get you thinking…why did the farmers who built these walls suddenly stop here? End of the property? Ran out of stones? There are so many walls, their presence almost gets taken for granted. It’s when a wall ends, that the mystery of that wall begins. “Wall’s End” 48 x 48
