Weathered Barn,
Tennessee
Robert Winter, 2004 

Acrylic on Stretched Canvas
18" x 24"

© COPYRIGHT 2004 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Artist's Notes

“What’s that hexagon doing in there?”

…Uh, which one?

There are about half a dozen hexagons clustered together in the right-hand side of the painting alone.

Then take a closer look at the shape of the barn’s roof.  What’s that a section of?   

How about the darker trees in the background?

There’s also a hexagon in the foreground grass.  And the whitish flowers in the lower right-hand corner describe a hexagon—just from a different angle.

Ultimately, almost the whole painting is hexagons. 

Hexagons are a longtime subject of mine.  I used to use a lot of overlaying ones in my abstract paintings.  So when I began noticing hexagonal shapes in this scene, I was off to the races.

I see hexagons as a primary building block of the natural world.  They’re in honeycombs…insect’s eyes…various plant cells…rock crystals…even the standard structural descriptions of various chemicals.  Hexagons also appear in optics—for example, when you shoot a camera toward the sun.

I’m fascinated by the way that the hard, abstract logical principles of pure science end up, with enough overlays and interplay, creating the wiggly organic stuff we know as life.  This painting gave me an opportunity to depict that process.

I wanted you to see the underlying pure-science shapes not in the context of some fastidiously sterile laboratory, but in the homey weathered shape of an old Tennessee barn. 

I wanted you to also see it in the foliage, and consider all the energies and interplay that go into the making of a simple leaf. 

Once you're open to that, I want you to inwardly hear all the varied chirps and clicks and buzzes of the insects in the meadow grasses--and share my wonder at it all.