Jamie Ribisi-Braley

Kim's painting of the WH sign

Kim and I had planned on going back to the farm on June 23rd to help them build their pizza oven...but nature had other plans! Heavy rain was in the forecast so the farm rescheduled for the following week.  But we figured we would get a few hours in before the droplets started so we packed the car and headed to a shady spot in the grass.   It turned out to be very hot before the rain started but we stuck it out for a couple hours to paint.

Kim wanted to paint the Wholesome Holmstead sign that sits at the opening to the driveway at the farm stand.  This is the first piece she made- mixed media on paper, 9x12"

Just Like Home,  Acrylic & Casein, 10" x 10"

I'm still fascinated with all the structures on the land.  This time I focused on the silhouette of the house.  The structure and layout of this building is really similar to my house, which used to be a farm back in the day.  I think that's why I'm so drawn to it.  This is a smaller painting (10x10") that I had started in the studio for a different purpose but it just wasn't jiving.  So I decided to take it along and paint on top of it.  This piece ties in my painting with the monotype imagery I've been working on.

To take a break from the paint and explore the farm some more, I walked towards the area where the pizza oven was going to be.  Behind it, I found one of the red barns that I love so much and leaning up against it was a beautiful wooden apple ladder.  It appears to be old and I imagine it's been used on the farm for decades...maybe just my imagination but I like to think that!  I had some old Polaroid cameras with me but the experimental film inside of them just wasn't capturing what I was seeing through the lens.  TTV was the next best thing so I made an intricate set up of a milk crate and cameras stacked on top of each other to steady the image.

When I got back to the studio I monkeyed around with the instant film images that were not developed correctly.  Some were too light to be anything or had thick blue lines through them or patches of undeveloped film.  (I've been using Impossible Film and some are breathtaking in the experimentation yet others are frustrating.)  Taking some ink and acrylic to the film, I recaptured the images and, in some cases, re-imagined what was there.