This farm is about a mile away, and sits against a wall of white pine. On misty days, the moisture in the air creates a soft filter, smoothing the sharp edges of everything, but particularly the backdrop of trees that site further back. Did this piece with that weather in mind…”Mist” 36 x 36
After putting time in on some larger pieces, it’s nice to work on smaller, more portable canvases. Came across this place years ago, in a rural Massachusetts town somewhere west of Boston. Another good example of how old farmers used the natural slope of their land to their advantage. “Slope” 16 x 20 o/c
My neighbor’s farm has new owners, as the woman who has lived there over the past 50 years is moving on, sizing down, and relinquishing the responsibilities of maintaining a large property, along with it’s 5 buildings. The farm’s future is unknown…will it remain a farm, become a neighborhood? We’ll see. It has been the inspiration for many paintings, including this one, derived from a recent walk around the property, with permission granted by the new owners. “Meadowshade” 36 x 36 o/c.
There are moments in a day, in morning and early evening, when the sun beams between and through things, and then hits a target…a tree, building, or meadow. It’s a moment that gets your attention. It’s those moments I love seeing, and painting. “Sunstrike” 48 x 36 o/c.
My neighbor’s barn and farm have been the subject of many paintings. I snapped a photo from the truck, while driving by it one recent the early morning. It was a cool misty September start to the day, with a yellowish sky from the sun rising through the haze, and the shadows cast from the rising sun were long and cool and followed the slope of the meadow. “Morning Shadows” 36 x 24
I read recently an article by a stone wall expert who estimated that if you laid all the stone walls in New England end-to-end, that one single wall could circle the globe four times. Accurate or not, few would doubt the abundance of these man-made archeological entities. Within a square mile of our house alone, there are far more than can be counted. This meadow is down the road, and is one of hundreds that were squared off by stone walls decades, or even centuries ago, when farmers cleared these glacial deposits from their land. “Erratics” 48 x 36
In early Fall, meadow grasses are a blend of their summer cool colors of blue and green, with the warmer, dryer tones of gold, yellow, and red…a transitional period that lasts only a few weeks. “Meadowgrass” 36 x 36 o/c.
I was recently asked about the process of composing and titling pieces, and whether these are “real” places, or imagined. They’re both. The inspiration is a real place, and that scene usually dictates the initial composition. But in the process of working up a charcoal sketch from the source, I modify to include things they may not have been there, or remove things that were. My memory of the subject can blend with memories of other pieces, and when that happens, I may modify the composition towards that other mental image. This is a good example. The actual barn complex is in Vermont, but while working on it, it reminded me of a small, hilly town not far from here…Temple, New Hampshire. I’ve done many paintings inspired by scenes in that small Monadnock Region town, so I took it’s name for the title. “Temple Road” 36 x 36.
There’s a stretch of shore along the beaches of Cape Cod Bay, between Barnstable Harbor and Harwich, where every fall the bay winds move the sand from beach to land, and from land to beach. It’s a barren but beautiful expanse of dunes with roads that wind through them to a parking lot at the end. I was there recently and the dune fences had recently been installed to hopefully encourage the sand to stay on the dunes. It never works out that way, but the effort admirable, and repeated annually. “Shifting Sands” 20 x 20 o/c
I came across these two barns in Vermont a few years ago. I’ve always loved how those who built these enduring structures built them where they needed them, even if the land didn’t cooperate. We tend to make land suit our needs nowadays, moving it around to accommodate construction plans. In the hilly landscape of New England, farmers had to work with the land, not against it. “Highland Morning” 48 x 48 o/c
