After five months working at home and painting interior scenes, I've spent the past ten days mentally in Marion County, Oregon, in the Willamette Valley (Salem is the county seat, but the old, still operating farmsteads are east of I-5). In June 2017 and 2018, I toured that countryside for hours. Immediately outside the municipal boundaries of Sublimity, I spied the farmstead that I've now painted three times (here’s the first rendering). I’m repeatedly drawn to the complex concatenation of human-built shapes and structures, the imprint of human economy on the landscape, and the wide-open landscape itself.
Before tackling the subject again, I wanted to learn more about the place. Despite its relatively small area for a western US county, Marion County is a big-time agriculture producer. According to the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (2014), Marion County has
the nation's highest acreage devoted to blackberries,
the nation's highest acreage devoted to boysenberries,
the nation's highest acreage devoted to hazelnuts,
the the nation's second highest acreage devoted to grass seed,
the nation's second highest acreage devoted to hops, and overall
ranks 36th in the value of agricultural products among all 3000 US counties.
The marionberry is named for the county -- which itself is named for the US Revolutionary War figure Francis Marion. That's odd, because Francis Marion was known as "the swamp fox" for his successful maneuvers through the swampland that surrounds my hometown (Florence SC) on two sides. The state university in Florence SC is Francis Marion University.
My goal was to learn what is grown on that huge clayey field in front of the farmstead -- which was in this tilled, tan-clay condition both times I've stopped and taken photos. Conclusion: it's almost certainly ryegrass, grown for seed.
Now, I wanted to paint that scene filled with tall grass. After some trials on small panels, I realized that the “stars” of the original scene need to be the complicated accretion of buildings, the vast field, and the large sky. This latest version differs from the previous one primarily in the horizon line, 50mm lower in general, and even a touch lower on the left, because I wanted it to intersect the implied door of the leftmost structure.
I developed a different composition to feature masses of waving grass -- that became Marion County. I wanted to show you both of these just-completed paintings.