A few days before the new year began I was able to go out and paint. The day was warming nicely when I met with Kent Brewer, Tina Bohlman, Doug Clark and some other local painters. We headed to Five Points, a small community in Ellis County, Texas. If you remember the movie Places in the Heart, with Sally Fields and Danny Glover, a few of the scenes in that movie were shot near this place in Ellis County.
Five Points has a really cool cotton gin, rusty tin, busted windows; history sitting quietly as the world goes by. I looked the gin over, but I decided to paint a bit down the road from the gin where I noticed some round hay bales in a field. It was a bleak, partly cloudy winter day, but the hay bales seemed to speak of something better, of warmer days.
9 x 12 plein air oil on panel titled Winter Harvest.
A fellow painter, Doug Clark, and I set up our easels in the direction of the round hay bales and old farm house and buildings standing in the distance. Even though there was a certain deficient in the color of a winter landscape, there still seems to be subtile and sometimes elusive hues waiting for the coming spring. Red, purples and blues mixing with the yellow ochre and sienna of the hay fields.
When I saw these round hay bales, as if guarding the little farm house in the background, all I could think about was God’s common grace. The grace that He pours out on all. His Kindness. The Bible mentions a particular kind of grace that all share in, as in Matthew 5:45b “for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” The hay in the field screams of the kindness of God. Psalm 65:9 thru 11 mentions the bounty God provides:
“You visit the earth and cause it to overflow; You greatly enrich it; The stream of God is full of water; You prepare their grain, for thus You prepare the earth. You water its furrows abundantly, You settle its ridges, You soften it with showers, You bless its growth. You have crowned the year with Your bounty, And Your paths drip with fatness.
Painting on location in Ellis County, Texas near the community of Five Points. 9 x 12 Oil on panel called Winter Harvest
Common grace and amazing grace. I titled this piece winter harvest, but also wanted to call it “Common Grace”, or even “Amazing Grace. The other grace revealed in the scriptures really is amazing. It is that grace God gives to us to come to Him. Ephesians 2:4, 5, 8 puts it like this:
But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved)
For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.
I know this is not the best painting “ever”, but I hope you enjoy it and notice God’s kindness toward us this New Year.
