September Cornfields

Every week I drive to Clay City, Indiana for work and one of the things I love about the drive is the range of rural landscapes that I see through the seasons.   I'm always inspired by something that I see.  Always.

The past couple of weeks, I've been watching the cornfields and so I painted this piece.   The cornfields out here are the first things to turn colors in the fall.   From early September until late October the colors are spectacular.   I'm hoping to be painting a lot of autumn inspired pieces over the next couple of months.   At the very least I'll be taking photos for reference later.  

I'm developing a painting 'process'.  I paint like I write.   In the first draft I get down the main idea and I play with a few options.  It's messy and ugly.  Then I start refining and adjusting and trying new things in the next drafts.   I've done as many as 15 drafts of the same landscape.   I stop when I've learned what I need to learn or when I get something I really like.

This is only the third draft of this particular piece and I'm really quite happy with it.  I learned what I needed to learn and I don't need to do another draft of it.   In this last edit I made the sky a much brighter blue to really emphasize that cloud and to balance all those bright golds.   I also added a dark shadow on the road from the corn so that the day would look really bright.    I strengthened the darks in the front at the base of the corn and at the back behind the cloud of dust on the road behind the bus. The roof on the house was originally dark green.   I asked Claire for feedback and she said I needed some red, so I changed the roof to red, which made the house a better focal point and an obvious destination for the bus and the eye.

Blue Chimneys

It's a chimney! 

It's blue!

How cool is that?

This house in Owen County, Indiana has not one, but two of them....

They totally beg the questions - Why blue?   and
Where do I get blue tile so I can have one, too?

Old Bridges - Eel River, Owen Cty, Indiana

Scattered over the midwest are these wonderful old metal bridge structures.    Turns out that quite a few of these old beauties were build by the Vincennes Bridge Company of Vincennes, Indiana.    The company was started by three schoolteachers in 1898.  By 1920, they were building 1200 bridges a year.

Here is a short Wiki on them.

What is really awesome is that someone has been photo-documenting these bridges.   Pop over to Bridgehunter.com to see a list of the Vincennes Co. bridges they have documented.   What a treasure!

This type of bridge is called a through truss bridge.   I love all those straight lines, all that beautiful geometry.   Plus, the rust against the blue sky makes me happy.

This bridge is visible from highway 157, crossing the Eel River, just north of Worthington, just inside the Owen County Line.

Just to top off the magic, the old signs are still in place.    Adorned with bullet holes.   Of course.  


The signs are old.   They say: 

1918
Built By
Vincennes Bridge Co
Vincennes, Ind
Jesse H. Johnson
James Andrew         } Com'rs
T H Ground
Samuel M. Rover   Auditor
Lou Drescher    Engineer


For a better view of one of the other signs on this bridge, go here.

If you click the pic at the top, you'll see that you get a twofer with that view. 

There's another bridge visible through this bridge.  

Here's what's on the other side.

It's a train trestle, running parallel to this bridge. 

Which means that there are three bridges over the Eel River at this spot: The new concrete bridge, the old trestle bridge and the old train bridge.

All are still in use.