Salinas River Valley Project
The Salinas River Valley is a vast agricultural landscape. Once called the Salad Bowl of the World, it is a rich farming environment that produces everything from lettuce to wine. Much of the farmland was ancient wetland and bottom land. Now a highly organized engine of fresh food production, it is a strange sort of wilderness in out midst.
Stand on a country road in the middle of this valley and you experience an expanse of space to all sides. Fields stretch out before you in every way to a distant horizon. It is an eerily quiet place except for the distant grinding of tractor and truck and the haunting sound of an unseen locomotive.
Dotting the landscape like little islands are old farm houses. Many of these are no longer occupied but used as storage buildings surrounded by parked tractors, ploughs, and diskers. These old houses make it easy to picture earlier generations making their lives farming here. It is quiet, too. On a Sunday, one can park and paint on a side road and in the course of two house only two or three cars will pass.
The open air, the wide sky, and the sprawling landscape has its own very unique, stark beauty. There is something about this beauty that I can not yet put into words. I doubt that my paintings can capture it but I am determined, at least, to get a sense of it.
To take up plein air again after a 5-year hiatus, I am focusing my plein air work on documenting the farm structures and other subjects in the nearby Salina River Valley farmlands. I have painted in the Valley before but never felt I gave it my full attention. After some years of not doing plein air, I am enthusiastic about the subject of the farmlands.
Here are some farmland paintings from a decade ago. I will revisit these places if they still exist for my Salinas River Valley project:
The painting below was painted this year, 2024, and is the first painting in my Salinas River Valley project…
See more Studio and Plein Air Oil Paintings
See more studio and plein air oil paintings here or click the link below. For a full catalog of paintings, visit robertlewisart.com.