This is a plein air painting I did up in Vermont. I was driving toward a wetland area that I had spotted the previous day when I saw this barn in the distance. At first I snapped some photos with my telephoto lens with the intention of quickly moving on, but then decided to try to get closer. This can be a challenge since many times a barn like this may be deep inside the private property of owners who may not be home. But I lucked out on this one, the barn was right off a side road, so I set up to paint.
It was a mostly cloudy day which worked nice for this type of scene. You see, the barn faced north, and on a sunny day the face of the barn would have been silhouetted from the southern sun, and the painting would not have worked. I took about two hours to paint this, with some slight modifications made later. I used my typical palette of just four pigments, Cadmium Lemon, Cadmium Red, Ultramarine Blue and Titanium White to complete this painting.
I called this painting "The Addition" because of the interesting white siding on the lower right. I'm not sure if this was just a siding job or if they added on a another section to an already existing structure. Either way, I love old barns like this. They are a testament to a way of life that is rapidly disappearing, the family farm, the small, independent family business. I'm glad that some people still hold on to this spirit, as this beautiful plein air painting shows.
The Addition
Oil on linen panel, 11"x14"
$890
2 comments:
Jason,
Like your painting. Just a thought, I would think that if this was not built all at the same time, any addition would have to be the portion above the white area and attached to the barn. Order might have been barn, white, upper?
The white part of the building is almost certainly the place where the milking equipment was put after the laws changed requiring bulk tanks and so on. These rooms have to be "washable" so they were often built of concrete block and whitewashed (to avoid rot problems with wood). If I had to guess, the addition dates from the early 1950's the barn much earlier, i.e. 1900 or so.
Fr. Mark who used to be an organic dairy farmer.
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