‘The Old Farm’ is by Alison C. Dibble. It is an original, one-of-a-kind fine art oil painting on panel, 11 x 14 inches, in a gold-colored plein air style frame.

(Click on the title or the product image and you can access numerous other pictures of this painting.)

I did the sketches on site, and painted the final version in my studio.

So many picturesque farmhouses and barns in Maine are in their final stage. They might become tear-downs. Most people would find them way too expensive to heat during our long cold winters. The young people who want to farm in Maine might have the skills and the stamina, but not have resources to fix these places up. We ride around the Maine countryside witnessing some crumbling barns, and farm fields that are growing up to alders. The landscape is changing with the loss of these farms, and our history goes with them, bit by bit.

It’s a melancholy thing, but I don’t dwell on the sad aspects. Instead I look to put a little life back into them, hold onto them longer by memorializing them in loose, brisk, colorful paintings. I’m a documentarian, sentimental and dispassionate at the same time.

This particular salt water farm on the coast of Maine is testimony to the hopes and dreams, and the hard work, of people who went before, who built the town and had their boats in the harbor. The farm is unoccupied now, but it still has so many distinctive charms. I admired the place for years, and then it occurred to me: I should try to paint it! Thank you to the landowner, who gave me permission.

I didn’t want this to be just like a photo. I wanted the viewer to keep returning to the painting with the question, “is anyone living there…or not?”. I think my lively brush strokes help give a little life to the empty rooms, and the quiet stalls in the barn. Meanwhile, the sugar maples are faithful to send their sap up the trunks in the late winter, just as they did many years ago.