White door on red

More meets the eye than white on red.

With hinges mismatched and tacked askew, bailing wire in the hasp supplanted by a pivoting metal strap, redundant still with a simple wooden toggle, how many ways is this door secured, albeit crooked, to the fraying fabric of its old red barn? A mossy brow of rusted flashing guards the white-planked frame top.

Hollow logs between barn and ground suggest a move sometime distant past, whole sills and beams and timbers rolling in a stately waltz across the farm meadow. Why? Where? Who knows?

© 2010 Duncan Dwelle

Hen house number one

© 2008 Duncan Dwelle

Hinge on faded red

© 2009 Duncan Dwelle

Lichen forest with fly

© 2007 Duncan Dwelle

Green grain
on redwood shed

© 2008 Duncan Dwelle

Harlequin hinges

Is this just a door? Or is it barn art, from the knowing eye and loving hand of a farmer/painter who sees more than splintered wood and bent nails? You be the judge.

Seldom do we see an old farm building showing such ravages of age along with the tender care of ownership. No such barns and outbuildings have economic justification. Most will disappear, to the farmers' regret, within this decade into heaps of blackberry bushes or ashes of a local fire department's practice burn.

Yet surrender is clearly not yet the fate of this startlingly crisp and delicious juxtaposition of bold white on faded red.

© 2010 Duncan Dwelle

Thistle glyphs

© 2009 Duncan Dwelle

Graton barn

Nature knows neither bounds nor limits to color, texture, and form.

Long before the hand of man traced his mind's eye across a blackened cave wall, every hue and shade imaginable had been splashed boldly on nature's canvas for a hundred million years or more.

Now man's work, so recently carved from trunk and cliff, returns gently from whence it came - beam and plank to humus soil, hinge and nail to flaked mineral rust.

© 2006 Duncan Dwelle

Whale's eye not

© 2009 Duncan Dwelle

Rolling door detail

© 2009 Duncan Dwelle

Sunrise (minus one)

"What light through yonder window breaks?"

A soft palette of dawn streaming over the shoulder of Sonoma Mountain brushes Shakespeare's immortal words gently across the face of faded plank siding.

Some near-forgotten farmer crafted this hen house to shelter helter-skelter flocks from foxes and frost.

No doubt he spent not a moment considering how, seventy years on, the subtle hues of mold, old paint, and wind-etched grain would find a place to hang in the halls of Nature's museum.

© 2008 Duncan Dwelle

Sunrise (plus one)

Less than three minutes later, a blinding furnace of direct sun has climbed relentlessly over the mountain brow, slashing that same silvered siding with newborn tones of brilliant orange.

All subtlety is forsaken, shaken off till sunset shadows recast these boards in tones blue and shimmering gray.

The human brain, a marvelously inventive deceiver, fools the eye to see the same. But look side-by-side and see the truth: photography is "painting with light", and the no brush is bigger than the sun's.

© 2008 Duncan Dwelle

Cattle chute

Gathering storm over south Asia

© 2009 Duncan Dwelle

Red shed shedding yellow

Is it red paint under yellow lichen or the other way around?

Van Gogh could have left this scene wiping his brushes dry from one of his signature hay stack paintings. But the artist here was merely time facing North in a damp hay field.

© 2010 Duncan Dwelle

Long knot

© 2009 Duncan Dwelle