John’s Barn

John’s Barn

• Oil painting
• 18” x 24”
• In the collection of J/P S

This painting was commissioned to feature a rural Kansas property. Two tapered stone pillars with balls of wrapped barbed wire stand at the beginning of a meandering single lane road through a forest where a 100+ year old ash tree stands. It continues around ponds and across a prairie to John’s barn. A 50 foot stone wall stands nearby. The cantilevered barn is built on a stone foundation that long ago was probably someone’s home. A corners of the building’s chiseled limestone foundation reveals etched initials of a former resident, perhaps the stone mason. The silo encases a circular staircase. The Wakarusa watershed is shown in the cloud with Clinton Lake noted. Dragonflies and butterflies are found among the prairie plants which include compass plant, leadplant, echinacea, butterfly milkweed. gayfeather, black-eyed susan, yellow coneflower and cattails. A fawn watches a great blue heron take flight, turkeys hide in the grass, a redwing blackbird sits on a cattail, and a red-start chases a sulfur butterfly.

If you like finding images in a work, follow this link to paintings I did for the Flint Hills Discovery Center’s Maps in the Schools project. You can go to the Discovery Center’s website to find the Middle School map painting with over 50 plants, birds, mammals, annelid, insects, amphibians, reptiles, etc. to identify.