This painting started out as a conventional portrait of our place in Huntly, on the border of Rappahannock and Fauquier counties and close to the eastern base of the Blue Ridge mountains. But the colors were too bright and the mood too contemporary for what the house really is (there's been a stone foundation there for a very long time) - a retreat out of sight of any neighbor. So I decided to sand it down and paint something entirely different, but as the house faded beneath the sandpaper it took on authenticity, and pathos, an evocative memory in dim attic light. I put a coat of varnish on the image that remained and on impulse pressed my hand into the still-wet finish, leaving the truest signature I could - my fingerprints. I felt I had discovered a painting sometime in the future, with tactile affirmation of the dusty and long-forgotten.
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