WIP A Carolina Farmscape

"A Carolina Farmscape"
Detail
Work in Progress
Oil on Linen Panel

It's been a week since I have posted and I hope you didn't think I was slacking away over here. I actually have been working on this 16X20 piece in hopes of coming up with something bigger for an upcoming show. What you see here is about the middle third of the painting. Many challenges here. First I normally work much smaller...so the size alone is daunting for me. Secondly, this thing has a lot of sky, a middle area of lots of details, and then the foreground is a tilled field that looks to be waiting for planting. That means a lot of dirt. And the sky...well, it is a spectacular sky and I don't know if I could ever do it justice.

Anyway, I've been working on this for the last three and a half days (in between Dr.'s appts. for my Dad and trying to keep my daughter sane since she is one of the casualties of the Bank of America job cuts). I hope to finish it up tomorrow or the next day.

I also want to announce that Peter Fiore has begun a new blog to share his landscape studies. He is one of the contemporary artists I admire very much, so I am happy to have him join us in the blogging world! Take a look and sign up!!


Of course the other distraction is the disaster in Congress. Now that the left wing has shown its real agenda in bankrupting the country with the so called "stimulus bill," otherwise known as the biggest socialist travesty I personally have ever seen. I hope some of my artist friends are finally seeing what a mistake they made in electing this bunch of thieves. Ever the optimist, I try to think that even people with no brains can see the hypocrisy and out-right lies in this "New Messiah and his cohorts in crime." As an artist, personal freedom means something to me. Having George Orwell's 1984 come to life before my eyes is not fun. Having the United Nations tell Americans how they are supposed to conduct their lives is not my idea of American values. Having a pig like Al Gore, who is a scam artist and the biggest hypocrite in the world, tell the rest of us how we are ruining the earth is disgusting at best.

So as I try to paint and capture what is left of family owned farmland, I am totally sad that the political elite are taking land and resources out of the hands of private citizens and giving the same away to groups like the Land Conservancy....taking your tax dollars to confiscate farmland and other open space, taking it out of the hands of American citizens forever. When I say confiscate, I mean confiscate. The government has punished farmers and taxed businesses out of business...so when the farmers can't keep paying the price of government, the Lands Conservancy groups step in and offer tax credits to take the land out of the private sector. What that means is that we lose the tax base of the farm, we pay for the maintenance of the land, and the land is no longer available for anyone for any reason forever. And you and I are then taxed higher in order to cover the loss of the farm taxes, and the maintenance of the land. In short, you and I are paying government bureaucrats to take away the farm / agriculture base that sustained the food supply of our country. The abominations go on and on and on....and I just keep trying to paint. And while artists sit around lamenting the loss of our beautiful farms, they do stupid things like voting in people who are planning to place taxes on farmers for methane emissions of cows and other livestock. They vote in people who create food shortages by pushing ethanol on the transportation industry.

Go figure...