Anyone who has followed my work over the past few years is well aware that the Tantramar Marsh has always been one of my favourite subjects, for several reasons. First, you can stand in one spot, anywhere on the marsh, turn a 360 degree circle, and see potential paintings in every direction, for as far as the eye can see. Second, it is my 'place of peace' - I grew up not far from that wide expanse of flat land beneath that endless dome of sky, and my visits home over the years always included a solitary drive out onto the marsh, just to walk around for a bit and listen to the silence, breathe in the freshness of the marsh breezes, recharge my inner self. And finally, there's the history - in addition to the facts of their usefullness over the years, I have learned in later years that my great-grandfather and grandfather actually built a good number of those old barns, so I feel a personal connection with them.
When I was a girl, back in the 1950s, there were over 300 wooden hay barns dotting the Tantramar Marsh. They were used to store the summer's bountiful hay crop, waiting for the haypress and later the baler to turn them into rectangular blocks of compressed hay which would then be carted back to the home barns to feed livestock over the winter. With the advent of the modern balers, which churn out massive cylindrical bales right in the field, there was no longer any need for the barns, and they gradually began to weather away. The decline speeded up over the years, until today there are just a small handful of barns left to be seen. I drive out across the Highmarsh Road now and feel the haunting presence of those ghosts, with all their stories forever stilled, yet whispering their lessons on those ever-present breezes, for any who will hear.
Back in the 1980s, by which time the barns had already been decimated and were continuing their rapid decline to nothingness, I took some photos of those which were still left at that time, all the while regretting that I had not thought to do that when I was young and they were still in their prime. It was as though we all just took them for granted while they were in use, not ever imagining that some day they would be gone and we would miss their presence. I have created numerous paintings of some of those old barns, in their various states of decay, and recently decided to try my hand at 'visual time-travel', so to speak.
This is my 2nd attempt to represent the Tantramar Marsh barns as they looked over a half century ago, when they were still in their prime. I acquired several old photos which aided in the placement of this particular stretch of barns along the Highmarsh Road, but relied very heavily on memory to establish how they would have looked back then, when I was a young girl with my nose pressed to the window in the back seat of our family car as we crossed that road so many times on our way back and forth from our home in Upper Sackville to our summer cottage on the Northumberland Strait. I guess I always loved those old barns.
