Evening Fencerow
"Evening Fencerow" (oil on birch panel 8 x 10 in.) 26 December 2025 finds me stopped on the road alongside a tangled fencerow, a few kilometres northeast of our home in Bishops Mills. Evening light on a snowy field glows warmly through an energetic screen of Buckthorn bushes where horizontal stems of Virginia Creeper follow the pagewire. This is where an old fencepost marks the end of the old rail fence, here mostly fallen down and snow-covered. The snow in the ditch beside me is rumpled up and poked through with spiky winter stems and tufts of dead grass. I was late getting out to do my traditional "birthday painting" this year, as we'd had an afternoon visitor. Prowling the country roads near home, desperate to find a suitable scene, I found it difficult to decide between this one and a simpler vies of snowy fields angled across by more distant hedgerows. I decided to risk the more exciting challenge of the near fencerow. I took a few reference photos and...