(Private Collection)
This image is based on an empty house about a mile and a half up the road from where I live. I was working on this last winter just before my exhibition at the University of Maine; it was actually still wet when I delivered it to the gallery to be hung. I had originally painted the sky a pale yellow color as I was trying to intentionally flatten the space, give it an overall warm tonality, and consciously avoid the impulse to automatically paint the sky blue. When I got the painting back to my studio, however, I was bothered by the feeling that something wasn't right about it. My first feeling was that the windows were too dark and I kept looking at it and thinking that they seemed too dark in the context of the painting, but they really weren't painted very dark at all. I did a series of pastel color studies and eventually decided to repaint the sky with a darker and cooler color, which really helped to create a sense of eerie light on the face of the house and made the windows recede back into the space, lightening their value by comparison to the sky. The title is lifted from one of my favorite Free songs and is a reference to the phenomenon that a lot of the old, empty buildings around here that I've used as subjects for my drawings and paintings over the past six years are no longer standing.
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