Homestead

This four-and-a-half-foot wide work is a collage of oil-painted landscape and iPhone photo images. I keep a camera with me always. I never know when I’ll see something I’ll want. So it was with this painting. I’d had an idea for a work with a big barn, and unexpectedly drove past this one on a backroad near Bantam Lake, Connecticut. Soon after, I spotted the tractor. I enlarged the barn and tractor photos, as well as grassy field, fence, and mountain images, onto thin photocopy paper that I glued to the canvas. I then dove in with my paint, largely obliterating, with the exception of the tractor, the original “capture” of the photo textures, colors, etc. Because of several layers of collaged paper in the work, the textured, vertical ripples in the hills and sky are a visible reminder of the craft in bringing this painting to completion.