“SEND MORE BARNS”

As a landscape painter, I work on location and continue to simplify compositions so they read as large patterns of light and dark. Abstracting the three-dimensional world into simple shapes is as important to me as capturing sunlight on form and realizing the essence of a location.

For purposes both prosaic and poetic, I work in a small format in the field and continue to study nature at different times of day and in different weather patterns– lost edges on a foggy day on Monhegan Island or the craggy coast of the south Kerry hold my interest as keenly as the vibrant blue shadows cast from a white silo on a sunny July day in the Hudson River Valley.

Born of an endless supply of sketchbook studies, the prints in this collection have taken more time and patience than the oils, and represent an almost obsessive investigation of the barns that act as sentinels around my homestead and inner landscape; their silos and haymows hold an important place in each composition and in my own history and heart as well.

I live in the home that my grandparents built, and the barns at Davis Corners have been part of my family’s work life for five generations. Over the years, some of the barns surrounding us have endured while others have fallen under the weight of this past century. That I get to bear witness to what sunlight does to a white barn on a sultry summer day, watch it simmer and then go violet before the moonlight takes over proves that my forebears must have done something very right. This work is dedicated to my family at Davis Corners, 1769-2012, who did more than paint barns so that I could.

Kate McGloughlin
Olivebridge, NY
May 2012

Mine is not a nomadic tribe. My mother’s family received this plot of land that we live on from the King of England before the Revolution.

When the barns went up right around 1800, that’s when it really became us. Five generations of the Davis family in Olivebridge have spent a great deal of time working in, and in my case, playing in the hay barn, horse barn, granary, feed and chicken coops, the pony shed and all manner of assorted out buildings that comprised our farm from that time until about the winter 2005 when the big barn finally fell to the ground with a giant sigh. The other buildings went down in their own time and on their own accord under the weight of an Uncle’s disinterest and the cruelty of time.

Not one of the cousins or city friends that came to stay and work with Vi and Lon or Grandma Davis can forgive the loss of the barnyard, the absolute absence of the landscape that held us and kept us busy during day long haying sessions (or more importantly the day long hide and seek games). Swinging from the top hay mow past the feed bin and on to the neatly stacked bales of hay, we were pirates and Tarzan and escaped convicts and cat burglars and heroes. We knew we had it made because we had a barn to play in; at every turn we unearthed cool stuff from another century, always had a place to work on our bikes when it rained, and never had to find a better club-house to meet in.

When my grandfather died he left our home to my brother Michael and said, “I know you’d rather have the barn, but I want you kids to always have a house to live in”. And so I do. And I make a lot of paintings and prints about barns of all kinds to send a wink to my ancestors to let them know that I’m grateful and that I was paying attention. And when I get a million dollars, I’ll rebuild the barnyard at Davis Corners.

Waiting for Michael | Columbia Neurosurgery

‘The New Walkway’ by Kate McGloughlin

 

Along a brightly lit hallway on the 4th floor of the Neurological Institute hangs a series of four oil paintings. Their muted colors and industrial lines capture the hospital’s surrounding neighborhood of Fort Washington.

They were painted by Kate McGloughlin from a handful of sketches she made while waiting for her twin brother, Michael, to recover from brain surgery.

“Michael was a strapping young Irishman,” says Kate.  ”He was just swinging along in his life, doing everything right, when he started getting these headaches.”

This was in 1989 and Michael was just 27 years old. Kate remembers, “He had been having a hell of a time all spring long. We finally got him down to the local emergency room.”

Four days later, at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, Michael went in for his first craniotomy.

Michael’s surgeon, Dr. Michael Sisti from the Brain Tumor Center and  the Gamma Knife Center says, “Michael had a tumor in the front of his brain. The surgery was very successful; the tumor just popped right out. There was no invasion into the brain.”

Kate says, “Michael, through the entire time, had the most optimistic outlook. It was so infectious. We just never thought the guy would die.  He’d be fine for 20-24 months and then he’d start with getting a seizure, or his one eye would look funny. It was a bear of a tumor. It just kept growing back.”

During one of Michael’s last operations, Kate says, “I took my sketch book and did eight or ten little sketches.” Kate is a print maker and a painter and from those six sketches came about 35 pieces.

“The gallery I was working for in Woodstock loved them,” says Kate. “We had this big show called ‘Waiting for Michael,’ because that is what I was doing when I was doing those sketches.”  The critics loved them.   Michael himself was at the opening.  Kate says, “He was the big celeb. He loved that something good could come from something so difficult.”

But, after nine years of repeated surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, “Michael had really had it,” Says Kate. “He was done.”  Michael died a few months after the exhibit.

Things got dark for Kate for a while, and so did her art work. She says, “I really had to make room on the bus for grief. The irony is that after that, my career took off.

About a year later I got a call, kind of randomly, from a guy named John Collins at the Department of Neurosurgery inquiring about the artwork. I said the only ones I have left are the large oils and he said ‘we’ll take them.’

It was a stroke of great fortune for me because, my studio was down in this tractor garage and got completely flooded that year, and I lost a lot of work.”

Kate opened a new account with the money she got from the Department of Neurosurgery, and determined to put any art proceedes towards building a new studio.  “And, don’t you know, once I opened that account and started putting money in it, I started selling work hand over fist. It was unbelievable.”

By the summer of 2000 Kate had drawn up the plans, had the building permits, and was building her studio.

It sits on her family’s old Dairy farm in Olivebridge, New York. Fashioned after a chicken coop, the 14×24 foot building has high ceilings, lots of light, and a tin roof for the sound of the rain.

“The other beautiful part,” says Kate, “is that, Michael’s friends helped me build it.  Actually build it–with hammer and nails.  I have this beautiful wall of Northern light because of one friend who got us all these recycled windows.

Every time I walk in there it is like another gift.  It is very inspiring.  There is something—I don’t want to get too corny—it’s like walking into a church in a way.  The studio that Michael built.”

We are privileged to have Kate’s paintings, and all they represent, hanging in our hallway. “I walk by Kate’s paintings everyday on the way to my office before going to surgery,” says Dr.Sisti. ”The beauty of the paintings and their connection to Michael, Kate, his family, and our hospital has been a source of daily inspiration to me since the first day they were hung up.  They demonstrate art’s power to speak to our struggles, memories, and hopes.”

Thank you Kate.

You can learn more about Kate and see more of her artwork at www.katemcgloughlin.com.

In Michael’s honor, donations are welcome at the Olivebridge United Methodist Church Food Pantry, PO Box 1397, Olivebridge, NY 12461.

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Department Author
In Blog, Brain Tumor Blog

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