For some time, I've been wanting to make a print of a barn.
To be honest, it has little to do with direct personal experience. I did not grow up on a farm, and my experience with livestock is limited to petting zoos and the cows I used to encounter at Shelburne. The only barn I know personally resides on my aunt's property, and it's been used as storage for as long as I've been around.
It all started when I lived in Vermont. During the summers I would ride my bike on the country roads around Shelburne, and I used to encounter the occasional barn or farmhouse during my treks. As I started going through the Museum's collection of prints, I came across quite a few barn scenes by artists like Asa Cheffetz and Luigi Lucioni, and appreciated their earnest, meticulous treatment of these seemingly quintessential rustic buildings.
Despite not living on a farm myself, I've had personal reasons as well. Around the same time I started getting interested in barns, my paternal grandfather died. Unlike me, he grew up on a farm in New Hampshire, during the Great Depression no less. Throughout his life, he was for me the stoic personification of New England, and I sometimes likened him to a weathered but stubborn barn, devoid of superfluous decoration but exuding his own kind of rugged dignity. Indeed, one of the early Sketch of the Weeks I posted here was of a barn-like structure inspired by him.
My personal creative activities are also influenced a great deal by my work as a curator and art historian, and recently I've had barns on my curatorial brain. One of my main interests right now is the community art center initiative, from which the Roswell Museum developed. Overseen by the Federal Art Project, these centers were based in rural areas in an effort to provide arts access to culturally underserved communities. The program operated from 1935 to 1943, with the first art centers opening in 1936. The Roswell Museum itself opened in 1937.
I've been researching the Museum's WPA archive for a while now, which includes exhibition checklists for the various shows that went through the center. One group of works that toured the Museum on a semi-regular basis was the Index of American Design, which was an attempt to document historical folk art and other examples of material culture in an effort to discern an essential American aesthetic. It was a highly selective endeavor that favored Eurocentric traditions, and was a natural outgrowth of the Colonial Revival movement and other antimodern sentiments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In other words, it's just the kind of culture that would embrace the rustic simplicity of an all-American barn. Despite its ideological flaws it was still an admirable undertaking that employed artists from around the country, and the results are beautiful. As an example, check out this watercolor of a Shaker cabinet:
Or this chair:
Of course, the Federal government wasn't the only entity interested in the creative potential of rural America. As the essayists of the recent exhibition catalogue Rural Modern argue, during the 1920s and 1930s numerous American modernists relocated from metropolitan centers to more rural settings for new opportunities, and applied their contemporary abstract principles to the countryside they encountered. Grant Wood is arguably the most famous of what have become known as the Regionalists, but he was far from the only one. Charles Sheeler's interiors of his Doylestown home are some of my favorite paintings from the interwar period.
Not that all of this material relates to barns directly, but essentially I've just been in a rural frame of mind lately, so when I sketched this barn at Los Poblanos during a recent weekend getaway, I know I was going to do something with it.
I started by working up my plate. Initially I had thought about omitting the cottonwood tree, but I ultimately decided to leave it in, figuring it would add some contrasting textures. I ended up changing the proportions when I adapted the sketch to my Plexi plate, but since this was less about a singular barn and more about the concept of barns itself, I felt justified in my modifications.
Although I had envisioned this print as a Plexi drypoint, I wanted to incorporate some different textures too, partially to capture the distinctly craggy bark of the cottonwood, but also out of artistic curiosity. For the first time in almost four years then, I tried my hand at incorporating some collagraphy into the print by pasting down strips of foil along the tree. I also painted some Modge Podge into the sky, and added raised dots along the bark, again so I could see what would happen.
After a couple of nights, the print was ready to do. I took it down to the Museum so I could use its intaglio presses, and inked up the plate. I was a little gingerly with the first wiping, as I wasn't sure how well my pasted foil would hope up.
After running my paper through the press, I had this image:
For now, what can I say, sometimes you just need to make a print of a barn.
 |
| Type in "barn" on Google and you'll get a lot of images like these. Courtesy of http://www.hobbyfarms.com/build-a-better-barn-for-your-farm-3/ |
To be honest, it has little to do with direct personal experience. I did not grow up on a farm, and my experience with livestock is limited to petting zoos and the cows I used to encounter at Shelburne. The only barn I know personally resides on my aunt's property, and it's been used as storage for as long as I've been around.
It all started when I lived in Vermont. During the summers I would ride my bike on the country roads around Shelburne, and I used to encounter the occasional barn or farmhouse during my treks. As I started going through the Museum's collection of prints, I came across quite a few barn scenes by artists like Asa Cheffetz and Luigi Lucioni, and appreciated their earnest, meticulous treatment of these seemingly quintessential rustic buildings.
 |
| Asa Cheffetz, Deserted Farm, ca. 1950, wood engraving. Image courtesy of https://brierhillgallery.com/asa-cheffetz/ |
Despite not living on a farm myself, I've had personal reasons as well. Around the same time I started getting interested in barns, my paternal grandfather died. Unlike me, he grew up on a farm in New Hampshire, during the Great Depression no less. Throughout his life, he was for me the stoic personification of New England, and I sometimes likened him to a weathered but stubborn barn, devoid of superfluous decoration but exuding his own kind of rugged dignity. Indeed, one of the early Sketch of the Weeks I posted here was of a barn-like structure inspired by him.
 |
| Luigi Lucioni, Shadows and Substance, 1943, etching. Image courtesy of https://brierhillgallery.com/luigi-lucioni/ |
My personal creative activities are also influenced a great deal by my work as a curator and art historian, and recently I've had barns on my curatorial brain. One of my main interests right now is the community art center initiative, from which the Roswell Museum developed. Overseen by the Federal Art Project, these centers were based in rural areas in an effort to provide arts access to culturally underserved communities. The program operated from 1935 to 1943, with the first art centers opening in 1936. The Roswell Museum itself opened in 1937.
 |
| Vintage Roswell Museum, ca. late 1930s-1940s |
I've been researching the Museum's WPA archive for a while now, which includes exhibition checklists for the various shows that went through the center. One group of works that toured the Museum on a semi-regular basis was the Index of American Design, which was an attempt to document historical folk art and other examples of material culture in an effort to discern an essential American aesthetic. It was a highly selective endeavor that favored Eurocentric traditions, and was a natural outgrowth of the Colonial Revival movement and other antimodern sentiments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In other words, it's just the kind of culture that would embrace the rustic simplicity of an all-American barn. Despite its ideological flaws it was still an admirable undertaking that employed artists from around the country, and the results are beautiful. As an example, check out this watercolor of a Shaker cabinet:
 |
| Alfred H. Smith, Built-in Cupboard and Drawers, ca. 1937, watercolor and graphite on paperboard, Index of American Design, 1943.8.16807. Image courtesy of https://www.nga.gov/education/teachers/teaching-packets/index-american-design.html |
Or this chair:
 |
| Isadore Goldberg, Armchair, 1941, watercolor, colored pencil, graphite on paperboard, Index of American Design, 1943.8.4113. Image courtesy of https://www.nga.gov/education/teachers/teaching-packets/index-american-design.html |
Of course, the Federal government wasn't the only entity interested in the creative potential of rural America. As the essayists of the recent exhibition catalogue Rural Modern argue, during the 1920s and 1930s numerous American modernists relocated from metropolitan centers to more rural settings for new opportunities, and applied their contemporary abstract principles to the countryside they encountered. Grant Wood is arguably the most famous of what have become known as the Regionalists, but he was far from the only one. Charles Sheeler's interiors of his Doylestown home are some of my favorite paintings from the interwar period.
 |
| Grant Wood, Young Corn, 1931, oil on Masonite, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art. Image courtesy of http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/detail.php?ID=228349 |
 |
| Charles Sheeler, Staircase, Doylestown, 1925, oil on canvas, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution. Image courtesy of http://www.artfixdaily.com/artwire/release/4535-major-exhibition-rural-modern-american-art-beyond-the-city-to-ope |
Not that all of this material relates to barns directly, but essentially I've just been in a rural frame of mind lately, so when I sketched this barn at Los Poblanos during a recent weekend getaway, I know I was going to do something with it.
I started by working up my plate. Initially I had thought about omitting the cottonwood tree, but I ultimately decided to leave it in, figuring it would add some contrasting textures. I ended up changing the proportions when I adapted the sketch to my Plexi plate, but since this was less about a singular barn and more about the concept of barns itself, I felt justified in my modifications.
Although I had envisioned this print as a Plexi drypoint, I wanted to incorporate some different textures too, partially to capture the distinctly craggy bark of the cottonwood, but also out of artistic curiosity. For the first time in almost four years then, I tried my hand at incorporating some collagraphy into the print by pasting down strips of foil along the tree. I also painted some Modge Podge into the sky, and added raised dots along the bark, again so I could see what would happen.
After a couple of nights, the print was ready to do. I took it down to the Museum so I could use its intaglio presses, and inked up the plate. I was a little gingerly with the first wiping, as I wasn't sure how well my pasted foil would hope up.
After running my paper through the press, I had this image:
It was a little dark for my liking, but once I saw that the collagraphed foil could withstand the tarlatan cloth I wiped the plate more assertively to print a slightly brighter impression. My perspective is a little off on the scene too, but such is life. I was happy with the way the foil and Modge Podge came out though, as I thought they brought in some novel textures without being overwhelming.
I ended up printing twelve impressions total; my editions are always small. Initially I had thought about going in and adding color to the tree to help it stand out against the barn, but I decided to leave it as is in order to play up the abstraction of the piece, with the work being as much about lines and textures as it is about rustic farm buildings. And as for the texture experiments, I'm glad to know that they worked because I have another project in mind that will use them, but that's a different post.
For now, what can I say, sometimes you just need to make a print of a barn.
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