Clifton, June 2-4

When Bob Emens contacted me last December about hosting, I knew I’d have to make his place part of my local “tour.” Not only was he the first person to make an offer after reading about my project in Mark Hare’s column, but his location – the hamlet of Clifton in rural SW Monroe County – added useful geographic diversity to my list of stops. And there was an added hook: Bob farms and pickles garlic scapes (see: Luke's Originals). How could I resist the chance to paint a garlic scape landscape? The time for that, Bob said, would be early June, right before the scape harvest.




A scape, incidentally, is the flower stalk of the garlic plant – typically cut from the maturing garlic plant before flowering, to allow the garlic bulb to develop more fully. The scape has been gaining popularity as a vegetable in its own right. This painting of a scape (above) was done on my second evening, as I waited for a dinner of pasta with garlic scape pesto.

I arrived on a hazy Wednesday afternoon. First off, I got a tour of Bob’s handsomely built house (he’s also an engineer and designer), and his extensive property. Then, after months of eager anticipation, I settled down to do my first garlic scape landscape. More exactly, it was a small field of garlic plants with the neighbor’s house in the background:





Here’s a second version:





I have to admit that painting garlic scape landscapes wasn’t as fun as thinking about painting them, but the effort connected me to the place and made me appreciate dinner more: grilled salmon with garlic scape pesto, and dill pickled scapes on the side. Fortunately my brief adventure in Clifton was just beginning.

After dinner we drove to the local cemetery – a small, square parcel of mowed grass with simple stones and several trees, including a venerable, dark spruce. I’m not someone who is necessarily drawn to cemeteries, but this one made me feel pleasantly – if oddly – at home. The place expressed simple beauty, and a sense of being cared for, despite evidence that some local teenagers had driven a pickup truck through some of the rows of gravestones.

I think it was partly the ploughed field along one side of the cemetery, stretching out and up across a large, wide hill that gave the place a special resonance. My spirit felt settled and uplifted at the same time. Late dusk charged the setting with mood and inspiration rather than spookiness – although I was a little unsettled when Bob, in another corner of the cemetery, started conversing loudly with no one I could see or hear. I’d forgotten he had a cell phone.




I did some sketching and made a tiny oil study but couldn’t quite figure out how to convey what appealed to me through paint. To use one of Bob’s expressions, I couldn’t get my head around it. Two days later I tried again, but in daylight. To get the mood and effects of dusk I’ll have to go back sometime with better focus.




A detail:





That first evening Bob also took me by Clifton’s main church. The next night, after meeting a sister of Bob’s who helps to keep the church maintained, I made a painting of it. The thick stroke of pale yellow paint is meant to be the headlights of passing car.





I'd never heard of Clifton before this project started. "And that's the way we like it," said Bob (and a couple of other locals I met), who also referred to it as "the town time passed by." There's more pride than regret in that epithet, and whenever plans resurface for a NYS Thruway exit in southwest Chili, residents of this hamlet rally to fight it off.  I'm glad they've succeeded so far. For me, living for a spell in Clifton provided a true break from the hustle and bustle and tension of urban and suburban Rochester. At times – walking quiet roads, poking around by old barns, hearing the birds and smelling wild roses – I felt closer to my childhood in rural Massachusetts than to what I'd known of Monroe County.

The dark side of this rural idyll was the poison ivy. I had been to nearby Black Creek Park before, and a walk around Bob’s property reminded me that poison ivy in this corner of the county grows about as aggressively as anywhere I’ve been. So for sitting down and painting I stuck to the cultivated portion of the property and nearby roadsides.




That was actually a good thing, as it got me looking around more than I might have. This painting and the one shown at the beginning of this posting were done along the road into Clifton center, between breakfast and a late lunch. In 5 hours, one walker and about 2 cars passed by. I sat in an aluminum lawn chair with old webbing that Bob said was about to break. It held up until I’d finished the 2nd painting, and then I fell through.

Here's the barn painting again, followed by some detail shots: