Muddy Pasture
acrylic on gallery wrapped canvas
22" x 28"
This little forgotten building overlooks a muddy, well-worn pasture after a hard rain in Shepherd, MT.
I have quite an affinity for broken-down buildings, and I guess I'm not the only one - the Yellowstone Historic Preservation Board is working to protect and preserve historic buildings of Yellowstone County, however big or small or seemingly insignificant they may be. They keep an online status list of structures in need of T.L.C., and it's sad to see some of the charming little buildings and farmhouses that have disappeared.
Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe. If it were worth the while to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair, then I was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which I had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him.
-Thoreau, from Walden
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