john
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During a family trip to Pennsylvania we did a tour of Amish country. Absolutely fascinating, and beautiful. Mules towing carts filled with tobacco. Ten year old Mennonite children turning over the soil with gas powered roto tillers, barefoot. Feeling the earth is important to them. The Mennonites embrace just a little more modern machinery than the Amish do. Blew my mind. People really live like this. No TV. No internet. No A/C. No electric lighting.
To get around the roads the Amish use push scooters.
Bicycles used to be an expensive means of transportation in the 1800s. For reference, when the bicycle was released in 1878, it cost $125, according to the International Bicycle Fund.
That would set the average person back around $3,355 in today's dollars, according to an inflation calculator.
And, for rural back roads, bicycles aren't incredibly useful; the roads weren't paved enough to ensure a steady ride.
Amish churches decided that they were impractical, so they weren't integrated into day-to-day practices, according to Steve Nolt, professor of History and Anabaptist studies at Elizabethtown College.
"As in many societies, once a precedent is established, it’s resistant to change," said Nolt in an email with LNP | LancasterOnline.
As roads improved, scooters became a readily accepted form of transportation, said Nolt.
"By that time, bicycles were simply not part of the Amish symbolic world, and scooters filled that role, both practically and symbolically," Nolt said.
Other Amish communities in the United States may end up using bikes or scooters, or neither. But, at least for the time being, be prepared to see Amish folk using scooters on the sidewalks.
lancasteronline.com
So during the tour, from inside the tour van, I got a photo of an Amish woman with a scooter unloading a bag. Later, after blowing it up I noticed that there was also a cat in the photo. It amazed me that I caught this intimate look at Amish life.
I decided to do an oil painting of it. I was new to oils, having been a watercolor painter. I initially tried to just copy the photo but it just looked bad. Gradually things like composition and color and visual interest dawned on me. So after six years and multiple revisions the only thing that remained was the woman and her scooter and the cat. The building was there but it's exterior completely changed.
And then it was put in the basement. Still not right. Overdone with awkward high walls on the house and overwrought dramatic stormy sky. An ugly unartful mess. A taunting failure.
I've recently wanted to get painting again. More seriously now that I have time due to partial retirement. But all these half-finished paintings of mine were bugging me. Especially this one as it seemed to have so much promise and I put so much time into it. Yesterday I decided to finish it dammit, and that the painting needed cropping, among other things.
Luckily I have a radial arm saw. This makes cropping paintings on panel easy to do, and very very final. After gathering my nerve I cut about half of it off. Yikes. Then I made some more revisions.
So some six years and many layers of paint later it ended up like this. I can let it go now and move on. It has released me back into the wilds of painting other new stuff that will humble me.
Sorry about the long post but to just post the image without the story didn't seem right.
7x8 1/2 inch oil on panel
To get around the roads the Amish use push scooters.
Bicycles used to be an expensive means of transportation in the 1800s. For reference, when the bicycle was released in 1878, it cost $125, according to the International Bicycle Fund.
That would set the average person back around $3,355 in today's dollars, according to an inflation calculator.
And, for rural back roads, bicycles aren't incredibly useful; the roads weren't paved enough to ensure a steady ride.
Amish churches decided that they were impractical, so they weren't integrated into day-to-day practices, according to Steve Nolt, professor of History and Anabaptist studies at Elizabethtown College.
"As in many societies, once a precedent is established, it’s resistant to change," said Nolt in an email with LNP | LancasterOnline.
As roads improved, scooters became a readily accepted form of transportation, said Nolt.
"By that time, bicycles were simply not part of the Amish symbolic world, and scooters filled that role, both practically and symbolically," Nolt said.
Other Amish communities in the United States may end up using bikes or scooters, or neither. But, at least for the time being, be prepared to see Amish folk using scooters on the sidewalks.
Why do the Amish ride scooters? What's the difference between a black and gray buggy? [We the People]
LancasterOnline is answering your questions through We the People, a public-powered journalism project.
So during the tour, from inside the tour van, I got a photo of an Amish woman with a scooter unloading a bag. Later, after blowing it up I noticed that there was also a cat in the photo. It amazed me that I caught this intimate look at Amish life.
I decided to do an oil painting of it. I was new to oils, having been a watercolor painter. I initially tried to just copy the photo but it just looked bad. Gradually things like composition and color and visual interest dawned on me. So after six years and multiple revisions the only thing that remained was the woman and her scooter and the cat. The building was there but it's exterior completely changed.
And then it was put in the basement. Still not right. Overdone with awkward high walls on the house and overwrought dramatic stormy sky. An ugly unartful mess. A taunting failure.
I've recently wanted to get painting again. More seriously now that I have time due to partial retirement. But all these half-finished paintings of mine were bugging me. Especially this one as it seemed to have so much promise and I put so much time into it. Yesterday I decided to finish it dammit, and that the painting needed cropping, among other things.
Luckily I have a radial arm saw. This makes cropping paintings on panel easy to do, and very very final. After gathering my nerve I cut about half of it off. Yikes. Then I made some more revisions.
So some six years and many layers of paint later it ended up like this. I can let it go now and move on. It has released me back into the wilds of painting other new stuff that will humble me.
Sorry about the long post but to just post the image without the story didn't seem right.
7x8 1/2 inch oil on panel
Good work!
