My sister JoAnn had a farm at the Brooks School in North Andover for several years until she retired in 2019. I took some photos on her last day there after my brother and I spent a long day helping her break down the farm. A month later I set about creating a painting based on views of the farm with buckwheat in the foreground that she was about to mow down as her last act before retirement.
This first painting is a rather romanticized view of the farm where I used memory and artistic license to create a sense of the farm with its vast space lined by woods and larger arbor vitae bushes on the right where her wash station was set up. I used a salmon pink underpainting made with cad. red light, titanium white and a little cad. yellow to offset the dominant greens and add a “late in the season” glow.
Since doing this painting, JoAnn commissioned several more paintings that include a large boulder near her greenhouse with a memorial lilac bush for late husband, Kamal. I did two views of the boulder and bush in the same manner–not exactly as pictured–but capturing the sentiment all the same.
I recently completely some new views based on photos and memory to add to her collection. These were quite challenging because the source material consisted of close ups and long views of really nothing except a large field surrounded by trees. I grappled with how to capture the depth of the farm as well as how to make a rather ordinary scene extraordinary.
This first one, Buckwheat, is almost the same view as the original Bobbin Farm painting above but with different cropping. I struggled with how to achieve depth on an 8×10 board as well as what to do with all of the green. Perspective came to the rescue with the rows converging into a vanishing point at the horizon line. The different crops called for different greens from a bright green in the foreground to more chartreuse and a blue green of the fields in the very back. The buckwheat in the foreground was flowering so I suggested that with dots of white.
The second one, Winter Rye, features a close up of the rye against the woods in the background. When my sister gave me this as a reference, I thought, I can’t do anything with this. I mean, there’s not much there. However, after attending a Monet exhibit at the MFA in Boston, I noticed how Monet took rather mundane scene such as a path trailing off into the woods and his intense focus on the foreground and thought, perhaps I can do something.