Eric Sloane

2017 Dale DiMauro

Eric Sloane was a noted regional painter who lived in both Connecticut and New Mexico. He wrote and illustrated over forty books with incredible drawings depicting knowledge of some of our ancestors building methods, craftsmanship and wisdom. Over the years I have acquired many of his books, primarily for the drawings which depict farm life, a way of life fast fading. He is also well known for his oil paintings, primarily of rural life, which number in the thousands. A few years back when my wife and I were at the Smithsonian Institute's Air and Space Museum we saw his mural of the sky, depicted on a great scale, along the entry way.

This watercolor painting I did many years ago is a copy of one of his oil paintings. I was inspired by the late afternoon light draped across the New England landscape with it's compound of farm buildings. 

At this point in time, I used payne's gray as an under painting to convey depth in a picture. The depiction of the eves and shadows across the landscape solely utilize payne's gray. It is not based on a Winter scene but I like how it reads as one.

One of the elements of this watercolor that I most admire is the sky with it's unconscious explosion of washes creating both soft and hard edges. There are small random marks in the sky left from where the paper was not wet, providing a textural quality to the scene. It is hard to capture these in a photograph on this scale.