Life and its stalks and fronds through the winter ...
Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 24 in (February 2009)

If anything reminds us of rural living, it's the log or split-rail fence. Often, as the fence parts rot away independently of each other, it is gradually restored in bits and pieces: a log here, a knot of fencing wire there. Over time, the fence becomes a display of several decades of progressive fence technology.

This scene is from a field off a country road near Williamsburg Ontario. It is a common sight, reminders of the old farm fields in rural Ontario, and the world for that matter. Fences, while serving to keep things in (or is it out?), also act as the home for communities of vegetation too difficult to be reached by grazing cattle, or be sliced away by the keen of a scythe. Straw remnants, mats of bunch grass, thoroughly interwined long stalk species of every kind become part of the fence work, a kind of natural enclosure. Not that long ago, they were doing the same for people!

As the vegetation lives and dies, mice, rats, moles, snakes and what have you burrow and weave tunnels and lairs, producing a condominium-like reworking of the inards. As with many communities, some less desirable elements — at least to the inhabitants — such as owls and hawks take advantage of the perches available, and wait for the community to emerge.

Big city, meet microcosm ...

This painting has been SOLD.
Please do not reproduce the images in this display.
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P.O. Box 659, Winchester, Ontario. K0C 2K0   613-774-5180
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