After spending a large part of this summer painting the farm sign a thought occurred to me: why stop there? There's no reason why the outsides of buildings shouldn't be as adorned with art as the insides. The barn looks amazing since Alex's wonderful dad Max spent many hot, sweaty hours painting it for us, and it now made a perfect background. So, armed with an array of beautiful Golden acrylic paints, semi decent brushes, an assortment of plywood scraps left over from various building projects at Consider Bardwell Farm and an ample quantity of Golden protective finish, I decided to embark on my next project, a plein air art gallery. I started with a smallish plywood scrap, about 17"x15.5" and did a simple portrait of Jill in a fanciful striped chapeau licking the last of a popsicle off her fingers. It's titled "Black and White Stripes".
That turned out pretty well, so I continued on with an action painting of Jill and her babysitting charges, Brantley and Amelia. They always love to run across the row of round bales lined up behind the barn and I particularly loved Brantley's cowboy boots and Amelia's outstretched arms.
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| "Adventures in Babysitting, Vermont Style" 17"x 23.5".
Dan came home with a particularly odd shaped piece of plywood, roughly 23"x28", that I thought would be perfect for a cow portrait.......
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| ...... So I caught Alice in the act of chewing her cud. |
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| I topped each painting with two coats of finish and we hung them a few days ago. |
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| They look a bit dwarfed by the expanse of the barn and the size of the new sign but my plan is to fill the entire exterior of the barn with as many plywood scrap paintings as I can. It may take a while, so stay tuned! |
