Lunch Hour (pastel, 2012)

These are the three barns behind the old, empty house on the Framingham Road where I have been spending a lot of time drawing over the past few months. This was done mid-day late last week from the north side, right behind the house. I only had about 20 minutes to work on it because I had to get home to meet my son's school bus and I wasn't completely happy with it when I got it back to the studio. I hung it up on the wall (with a bunch of other drawings that I'm not completely satisfied with) and have been studying it all week. I found the problem was that the grass was a bit too green and the roof tops too purple and they were fighting with each other. I took some light yellow ochre and scumbled over the grass and the roof tops and it all came together.

Garage in the Woods (pastel, 2012)

I've often noticed this garage at the edge of the woods beyond a big meadow behind the Littleton potato house. You can just barely make it out from the old railroad trail that runs between the Station Road and Wiley Road. I was out walking around with my backpack full of pastels a couple of weeks ago and decided to trudge through the 1/4 mile or so of brambles and thorns (and hidden streams!) in order to get a closer look. I'd love to know what the story is with this structure as there is no path or road leading up to it from anywhere. Maybe there was a house there once that burned down and then the trees just grew up around the garage. There's an old camper parked about 30 feet to the right of it, obscured by the trees from where I was standing. Anyway, this odd little structure surrounded by dense forest and set back from me by an overgrown meadow made for an interesting subject for a drawing.

Three of a Kind (oil on canvas, 2012)

(Private Collection)
There's a great line in one of my favorite David Lynch movies, "Lost Highway", spoken by Bill Pulman's character when he says, "I like to remember things my own way...the way I remember them, not necessarily the way they happened." I do a great deal of paintings based on memory. Sometimes I will come back to my studio with a very loose, gestural sketch which I will develop into a painting based on my memory of looking at the subject. Also, I find that even when I am looking directly at a subject and working, memories, especially from my childhood, will enter into the image. A scene will remind me of a place or time from when I was young and I will, through choices of color, composition, etc., paint the scene to look like my memory rather than an objective representation of the subject. This painting was done in my studio based on a sketch that I did last summer of these old barns near the Wiley Road here in Littleton, which I have drawn many times over the past few years.