Winchester Study
oil on panel 7" x 9"
"What we make out the quarrel with others, rhetoric;
but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry."
W.B. Yeats
"I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious."
Andrew Wyeth
This image has been with me for 15 years or better. In the middle of a small city there once stood an abandoned mill or factory, probably built around the turn of the 20th century. When I discovered it the buildings were empty and the fencing around them had gaps and holes. I took my camera in on a beautiful fall day, intent on getting everything I could then and to return the next week with my french easel to make oil sketches. I shot three or four rolls of black and white film - all I had with me that day because I had simply been running an errand and hadn't counted on such a visual gold mine to appear. My return with painting gear was delayed a week or maybe two but finally early one morning, with similar light conditions once again present, I loaded up the painting gear and headed out for Winchester. When I reached the spot, full of anticipation for an entire series of paintings - I found the buildings had all been bulldozed to a pile of bricks and rubble. Completely destroyed.
Since that day those images on black and white film that I processed and printed, have been embedded in my memory, my imagination. I have debated trying to make paintings from them - worrying ways to separate my painting process from the dictatorship of photo detail. I have wondered and dreamed and imagined how best to deal with these images of places no longer existing. Ghost buildings. Lately I've begun making rough charcoal sketches and small oil studies, debating, worrying, dreaming of strategies to keep the images ghostly and mysterious without losing their particularity. As much from the subconscious as from the images - and I believe I will discover, art lives on the razor edge between the two.
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