Piece By Piece

I know that this barn is still used because I've seen machinery through the doors opposite the side seen here.  I would love to go into this barn because I can imagine the light and shadows would make for interesting designs on the walls and floor.  I don't know if the ranchers and farmers that own these structures can't afford to tear them down or don't have the time, but I'd like to think they are as fascinated as I am in their slow demise.  I would also think there is quite a lot of useful wood, especially in this one, which is pretty big.

I usually hate to see piles of junk in rural areas, especially old cars and machinery, even though I understand they may be kept for parts.  I know the farm my father kept was always tidy, so I guess he set my standards. However, these old structures strike me differently, and I always feel I've found a treasure when I come across one.

The Sky Is Falling!

This barn in the Idaho Palouse caught my eye during my last visit.  It's difficult to know if it was well built because it is holding itself up after some sort of confrontation with something or if it was not all that well built and is imploding on itself.  Perhaps its builder forgot to put in all the fasteners at one critical junction.  Or perhaps aliens were lobbing angry birds at various targets in the open fields.  

Regardless, the barn spends its life now as time's plaything.  

I have begun a series of paintings as a kind of portrait of these mostly abandoned structures.  I find them as beautiful as they are disturbing.

Crashing Barns

I was raised on a farm in Illinois and I loved the barn.  Actually, we had several barns for different uses - one for the dairy cattle, one for hay, one for machinery, etc.  I spent a lot of time in them, even though I had hay fever as a boy and being in the barn meant spasms of sneezing and wheezing.  I'd find litters of feral kittens, I'd jump from what seemed great heights onto relatively soft mounds of loose hay, and I'd play with friends among the several levels of stacks of grain being used up.  

As I travel about Idaho, I often see barns or other out buildings simply abandoned after their effective uses were over.  I'm certain there are stories for each structure, either about their uses, or about the dreams associated with the building's construction, or stories of boys playing within them, perhaps getting into trouble or hurting themselves or at the least creating memories still enfolded in the creases of their minds.  

For me, and others who just pass them by, they take on a kind of charged imagery.  They reflect our own gradual passing into a used up condition and they stir our fear of abandonment.  They are just left out there, to decay in public and they aren't even taken apart for firewood.

I'm glad they aren't.  There is a strange beauty to them for me.  I've started a series of paintings of some of the ones I've come across in the countryside and I'm calling the series "Crashing Barns".  Instead of looking passive, they look more as if they have been assaulted - dropped from the sky, hit by a meteor, tripped over a stump, exploded, or imploded.  Often they fall apart as if time itself has repeatedly flown by and ripped off another board.  

I will have four of these paintings at my gallery in Boise for January in the new year.  Come down to 403 S 8th St to see them if you are in Boise.