Road Work
Watercolor, 8×10

This is my favorite view of the valley in back of the Norman Rockwell Covered bridge in Arlington VT, and it’s also my favorite time of year to see it.  The leaf peepers have gone back to the cities, and the only traffic on this road are a few morning commuters and a member of the road crew charged with getting this road along the Battenkill ready for winter.

A Hay Oddity
Watercolor, 5×7

So I learned a powerful lesson on Saturday.

The last outdoor art fair anyone should do in Vermont is Columbus Day Weekend.  And that’s only if you have a windproof, waterproof, and – you got it – SNOW proof tent to cower in when the weather turns south, or in this case north.

It was a good lesson and had me rethinking a new plan to paint au naturale in the mornings. Or maybe it was en plein air.  It was the one that won’t get you arrested, anyway.

A lucrative but frigid festival on Saturday turned my Sunday into a day planning a winterized plein-auto studio, complete with a table for my steering wheel and a setup for brushes and water in my cupholder (that’s totally normal, right)?

Monday was glorious, of course, but today a soggy bone-chilling morning greeted us.

I headed to Manchester after dropping the kids at school, looking for the perfect vista.

Manchester, VT is a bit of an oddity.  It’s a ‘gold town’, attracting skiers and designer outlet  shoppers, with a few middle class neighborhoods still holding their own.  You can see the majestic Equinox mountain, but you have to look over the inns and malls.  There are a few cows living next to the water treatment facility, and if you get further into sub-suburban Manchester – as I did this morning – you can see a few rolled bales of hay in the front yards of some of the well-kept and growing housing developments like the one I stopped to paint this morning.

I put the iPod on shuffle and the heated seats on high.  Every so often I had to turn on the wipers to see my subject.  An older gentleman walked by, giving me the hairy eyeball until he saw a brush in my hand and grinned at me. It’s an odd setup for painting, and it made this picture of a lonely hay bale at the edge of an otherwise conventional house development seem all the more appropriate. Keeping my grinning stranger in the painting walking down the road seemed appropriate too.

A rainy Friday kicked off the long weekend.

As I drove down our road on Friday afternoon, headed to a Creativity Workshop in Cambridge, NY, I knew the much-needed rain might have been a bad omen to some people.  For me, however, it was the celebration of the end of my own dry spell.

The rain made the workshop, held in a round cord-wood house at Pompanuck Farm, seem like a cocoon – a safe place to question, learn and grow.  As it ended, I heard creative butterflies talking about plans and exchanging ideas, and I knew the rain had been a good omen for them as well.

Magic in Bedlam, Watercolor
5 x7

We’re headed over the mountain and through the woods to Bedlam Farm in a few minutes to enjoy the magic.  It must be magic because what was originally predicted to be a rainy day is cool but sunny and glorious.

I will be selling prints of this watercolor at the Bedlam Farm Open House today, but if you can’t make it to Cambridge today, you can also buy prints on my Buy My Art page.

The Honor Box 5 x 7, Watercolor

I’ve been stuck on this picture for a few days.

At first it was just a collection of memories of the Big Guy hopping out of the car on the way home for the last thing on our shopping list.

Now I realize I’ve been a using it to stay connected with our very small world, where  people still leave doors unlocked, kids walk in the woods alone and people from completely different walks of life can solve the world’s problems over a heated discussion at the country store and still lock arms for a square dance at the annual ox roast.

They’re little things in the grand scheme of things like a sporadically imploding economy, violence and a deteriorating environment, but there’s something good in keeping the honor box healthy and being able to see the things that bind us more brightly than the things that can divide and destroy us.  So when I paint the cooler with the brown eggs and the honor box over and over again, it’s not an escape.  It’s an exercise in optimism.

Storm over the Equinox Watercolor 5″x5″

Saturday, Thing2 packed up his origami books and I packed up my watercolors and doodles and drove over to the Harvest Festival in Arlington, VT.

We didn’t expect to retire on our earnings (there was a mega old-time fair in nearby Peru, VT on the same day drawing serious crowds), but it was the biggest craft market of the year in our town, and we thought we might be able to buy an ice cream at the Dairy Bar when the day was over.

So we setup the tent, hung a few paintings and magnets and origami swans and sat down to wait.

We didn’t sit for long or for long throughout the day.

I had hoped to sell a few magnets but was happily shocked when watercolors – even ones I thought were borderline duds (and had almost made into bookmarks) –  started coming off the pegboards and out of the tent.  T2, who was watching my sales closely, began mentally converting dollars to chocolate sprinkles and adding a bounce to each step.

I could do this, whispered a voice inside my head. Wait, I think I am doing this.

T2 must have a direct line to the chorus in my head because as I sat down for a break, he wrapped his arms around my neck and said, “Mom you should just sell your pictures for a job.”

You gotta love getting job advice from someone who hasn’t yet been told by the world (and he ain’t gonna hear it here) that you can’t make a job out of art or music or anything outside an office.  It’s delivered with just enough conviction to make you realize that it may actually be happening.

I hugged him back and said, “That’s a pretty good idea, buddy.”

And that’s reason #5628 why I love that kid.  I ended up taking them all out to dinner.

Take Me Home, Watercolor 12×18

A day of rest can mean a lot of things.

Around here it means inking a cartoon and finishing a banner for a website and a day of painting.

This is the final version of a painting that began with Kissing Frogs. One of the things I’m slowly learning is that you have to draw a line in the sand and tell yourself the work or painting is done – even if you think there are things you could have done better.   It’s the only way to keep moving forward.

If you are interested in purchasing this piece, please leave a comment or message me at rachel @ rachebarlow.com