Barbed Wire Memories Oil on Canvas Panel The interesting thing about living in a small town that is experiencing rapid growth is noticing the remains of the old in the midst of preparations for the future. On the beltway around Auburn, there are sprawling townhouse complexes being built to accommodate the student population. From an artist's perspective, there is not much you can do with these highly functional yet ascetically lacking buildings. Yet, holding out amongst them is an old farm and it is an artist's dream. It has everything a landscape painter dreams of: a crooked front porch, an old barn with a rusted tin roof, a shed pasture with horses, and another pasture with black cows. I have wanted to paint this for years. I focused on it today. It was a beautiful sunny blue-skied morning and every angle on the farm looked great. My problem was I only had a 5”x7” panel and I had no shade umbrella. Every great spot was out in the bright sun and I would go blind looking at a white canvas. I thought maybe I could see the farm from the shade of a side street, but had no luck because the view I wanted was obstructed. As I weighed my options between just going back to the studio ( I had portraits to paint that day) versus persisting with my painting this farm, I remembered stories of what the great painter John Singer Sargent would do when he went landscape painting. While all the other artists searched about for the perfect location he would just walk out put up his easel and paint what was in front of him. So I looked in front of me and saw an old fence line with broken barbed wire, an old cedar tree, goldenrod, and the faint line of the highway behind it. It was past meets present. Barbed wire fences are the constant reminder to small towns of their recent past. I live in downtown Auburn, but yet in my yard are some remains of the barbed wire fence that was there when it was a farm. In the painting, the wire has been attached to the tree many years ago. As the tree grew and the posts weathered, it pulled the wire up and buried it in its trunk. I hope the little farm holds its ground and resists the urban sprawl. There are many more paintings to be done of it . Next time I'll bring my umbrella. |
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