This is an original oil on canvas, Two Houses, which I did at a time when my work was going through a transition. I had been doing representational (based on recognizable images) work for about seven years, and felt the need to break away from its restrictions. I had done less naturalistic images as a graduate student many years ago, and wanted to go back to working more closely to my original impulse. If you are a representational painter, you can get sometimes get too much, or not enough, resistance from your subject matter; I felt I was getting too much resistance, and it was time to break the pattern. At the time, I had a job which required a commute of over an hour, and every night I would drive home on the back roads. At twilight, I would see the sky at its deepest blue, with stars just becoming visible and bright. It was during the winter, and the bare trees stood against the snow; old farmhouses stood against the sky, and of course the cows were there. I could see little lights in the windows, and the hilly landscape seemed almost like a huge sculpture, curving out and down. I wanted to sculpt it in clay, which I might do someday, but in the meantime I wanted to paint it from memory. The little crosses could be birds, or they could be just a means to delineate the landscape. I like the transparent house in the bottom right - it lets the eye flow through it, in a compositional sense. This painting is professionally framed with a plain natural wood, stained lightly.
