12x16 in. oil on cotton canvas panel
A late summer day looking south on Saxonville Pond. It's a ponding of the Sudbury River that provided power to the Saxonville Carpet Company, which pounded out those brown, dark green, and indeterminate-but-murky-colored rugs you'll see in museum reproductions of middle-class rooms circa 1910. The mill itself is now a warren of small shops, an artist enclave, a harpsichord-maker, various engineers, and a couple of storage companies. Eerily, water still flows through the sluices to the mill's multiple water wheels, giving a watery-rumbly ambience when you're inside the mill.
That New England barn isn't really there. What's really there is an unbelievably garish bright turquoise raised-ranch house.
This was painted in an afternoon shared with Brother Eugene DiLauro, a local painter in his late 80s with (no surprise) a deep spirituality about him. Long ago, he spent more than ten years in South American poverty-ruined areas, where he alone or with another Brother supplied guidance, education, and through his religious order, goods and necessities of life.
He returned with a heart problem, having given his heart to his villages. The local Diocese reciprocated with a full scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design.
It was an honor to paint alongside of him in one of the very few classes he has offered.
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