The 12 Paintings of Christmas #10

psalm 166, oil painting by Roger Vincent Jasaitis, RVJart.com
psalm 166, painting #10

The Twelve Days Paintings of Christmas

Holiday Special!

With this auction I am celebrating the twelve days of Christmas by auctioning 12 original oil paintings. This is painting #10
 

This is an original oil painting “psalm 166, Ascutney View” . In hiking late in the autumn, with the last of the leaves on the trees, I found this hilltop meadow and wall. This view is towards Mount Ascutney in Vermont. The Native Americans considered this mountain to have magic and spirits on it.  The walls were built 200 years ago using oxen and stoneboats. They were a way to use all of the stone left in the soil after the glaciers retreated. All of Vermont was agricultural in the past so there are thousands of miles of walls across the landscape. If you dig or plow the soil here you can’t help but unearth field stone. The easiest thing for the farmers to do was build walls with all the stone both to delineate property lines and fields and keep in animals.

These walls lend a sense of time and history to the landscape. Since Vermont has substantially reforested over the last century most of the walls are in deep forest now. The juxtaposition of the wildness of the forest with the hand-wrought aspect of these ancient walls I find moving. They show the temporality of our existence on the land.

#2111103 “psalm 166, Ascutney View”, 14″x18″, oil on panel 

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