Fadeout

Fadeout   oil/canvas   20 x 30 x 1.5

 

Scene:   A typical drive back from Columbus on 1-77 North

Task:  Photograph as many barn scenes as possible from my passenger seat in my moving vehicle

I have never had luck with this before, but current technology allowed me to zoom in on the scenes most satisfactorily.  Barns have really never been my thing...nor landscapes, for that matter.  But....I am a believer in pushing myself.  This particular scene really stuck my fancy with the barn  disappearing into the horizon in the grayness of the day.  I finished the work to my almost-satisfaction but the scene did not allow this painting to be read at any distance.  And so I added a slight color temperature shift at the top of the roof.  That seemed to do it for me.

And as for barns?  Why do we enjoy them so much?  I am not sure, but the simplicity of the shapes, and of the scenes, keep us in touch with our primitive agricultural roots.  Enough said

Maybe another barn next year?.

Come Spring

Come Spring   Watercolor   17.5 x 24

is an expression that implies jobs and tasks that will be undertaken once the winter weather clears...that which is yet to be.  Earlier in my artistic career, I swore that I would never paint a barn.  For me, those barns painted during the 70's and 80's reached a kitsch level...way too sweet, way too charming.  Never say never.  As I drove along shooting references for a landscape painting, the subjects that most appealed to me were both buildings and animals.  The bare landscape just doesn't do it for me.  Maybe just too much green, as was spoken earlier on by Georgia O'Keefe.  I wanted my own barn to be more current, at least as current as an old barn can possibly be.  It is somehow comforting, a symbol of the everlasting, of the work that sustains us. 

This is my offering to the subject of "spring landscape".

Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge. (Winston Churchill)