Wildness Takes Over

Purple Haze. Oil on canvas, 8x10
sold

I have a thing about abandoned houses, especially ones I drive past or walk past, day after day. I construct lives for them, families and dogs, landscaping, decorations. As vines grow over them, and windows break, as roofs sag and paint chips and thins and fades, wistfulness grows in me, and the buildings seem to take on more life, not less.

This is a house on Route 17K, just outside Montgomery, N.Y. It's more abandoned than it looks in my painting. There's a big hole in the roof, and in front of the house stand the remains of a sign that once offered the house and its land for sale.

Even as the house sinks into its demise, and the yard grows up around it, it's taken on a wild sort of beauty, a harmony of color and chaos and the way of the world.

There's a song by Kate Wolf that I've always liked, "Carolina Pines," and that song ran through my heart as I made this painting.

Here are the lyrics; it's a pretty, pretty song:

Carolina Pines

Just an old house with the roof fallin' in Standin' on the edge of the field Watching the crops grow like its always done before Nobody lives here anymore The sun's going down on the Carolina pines I'm a long way from home I miss that love of mine broken windows empty doors Nobody lives here anymore Old memories come whistling like the wind Through the walls and the cracked window panes And the grass is growing high around the kitchen door Nobody lives here anymore Once there were children and a few hired hands A hard working woman and a bone tired man Now that old sun steals across a dusty floor Nobody lives here anymore