I editioned this years ago but something about it always bugged me so it was relegated to a drawer. Two weeks ago I sliced a lot of roadway from the bottom of the plate and all of a sudden the eye was drawn to the barn, not the road!
These are printed in black with an image area of 35.5×58.5 cm (14×23″).
These hay pulleys ran along a track near the peak of the barn roof. The bottom pulley clipped onto a large fork that dropped down and stuck into loose hay on the wagon just in from the field. The rope was attached to a team of horses that would pull the hay up to where it could be dropped into the loft. Hot, dusty, sweaty work.
This is a four colour print with an image area 28 x 34 cm (11×14.5 inches)
This barn, one of Ontario’s ubiquitous bank barns, was in the middle of a field on a sideroad way, way out in the country. It looked quite safe from developers’ bulldozers.
The print is one of a series of larger barn prints, this one is matted to 14×23. The barn was red, honest!
Most printmakers show progressive prints as a sort of educational/interest thing, I’m doing it just to get a bad pun out of my head and into the subject line.
It feels better already.
This is one of the only engravings I’ve done from a photo; it
shows my brother watching the rain when we were supposed to be bringing in hay. I was working on it 19 years ago today then I took my daughter trick or treating, got sick and stayed off work for a week. I remember all of this because 1: I thought I’d use that stay at home time to finish the engraving and screwed it up so badly I started over and 2: I quit smoking.
It’s a good thing I dated it, I’d forgotten how long it’d been:-)
clive lewis, printmaker 