LINDEE CLIMO

This year marks forty years and four hundred and ninety some paintings since I was caught by something in a reproduction of a painting by Rosso Fiorentino. I had been painting for a year from old sepia photos that belonged to my rural New Brunswick neighbors. My paintings were of long gone farm animals and farmers. The following year, I moved to Prince Edward Island and continued painting from photos belonging to the farmers I met through livestock showing. There was a heavy snowfall in October and the snow kept piling all winter. With a cow to milk twice a day, I stayed put and painted. I did visit a family nearby who had recently spent a year in Florence, and they loaned me an Uffizzi book.

 

My own museum visits to the Vatican and the Rijksmuseum surfaced in my memory and simmered with the experiences of my livestock keeping. Snowed in, I read that Rosso had never completed the Uffizzi painting that I liked most, "Moses Defending the Daughters of Jethro", with its detail of a few frightened sheep looking up at one of the daughters. I felt permission to finish the sheep. It felt as if I was studying with the great painter. Almost every painting I've painted since, certainly every piece in this exhibition, was painted with this in heart.