Burning Fields- Camp Verde

16” x 16” | 2019 | Oil on Gesso Hardboard

I was painting with my artist buddy and good friend ML Coleman, and we were exploring Camp Verde. We were on the old twisting Salt Mine Road before it was widened and I could see the farms below. When I was a child on the farm in New Mexico, it was traditional to burn the fields and ditch banks. That day, the smoke from burning fields glowed in the morning light and the lingering smell caused a rush of childhood memories, and I insisted that we stop and paint. Today, the farms, like most of rural America, have changed due to population growth. This painting is of its own place and time in 1988, and it is blended with clouded nostalgic memories of me as a farm kid, working that land. As with most of us, I have chosen to remember only the beautiful about the place I called my family home.