At work in the rice fields Print

A large original oil painting of a farming scene from back in the 1980s when I was a kid and working in those fields. Harvesting was a long hot day we started work early morning and finished about 2am working under big lights which would run off the tractors battery, only stoping for short breaks to eat. Those fields were enormous, the local farmers with their farm workers would come to help as we would help then when they were ready. Once the rice was ready we would cut it leave a day or 2 to dry then bundle and tie it, we used to use banana tree or bamboo I preferred banana, bamboo would cut your hands to pieces. When in bundles we would load onto trailers using thick bamboo sticks to hoist it as much as 2 meters high. The trailers would be taken to a part of the fields where we would build massive haystacks, the haystacks had to be carefully build and was a skill in itself. That threshing machine you see in the painting was the first of its kind in my home and saved a lot of manual work. The rice dust blown out of that machine was horrendous you would be covered in the stuff, if the wind blew in the wrong direction we would have to stop work as you wouldn't be able to see. It didn’t have any safety features and took more then one arm off including my Uncles. We would form a chain from the top of the haystack to the threshing machine, which shook the rice from the stalks blowing the chaff out of one vent and the rice another into sacks ready to be loaded onto pickups. I remember the red flaming sky looking like burnt oranges as the sun was going down just amazing to watch, changing all the time not that a lot of people noticed but I did, I’ve tried to replicate here as I’ve tried to recreate that sky so you get an impression of what it was like, we do have the most beautiful sunsets in this part of the world. It was hard hot work and some would tell stories as we worked which helped the day go quicker we all wanting to get the work done and go home to bed ready to start again the next day. The canvas was prepared with several coats of Gesso I use only the finest oil paints,it has lots of detail also using large brush strokes and a palette knife it also has one or two of my tears mixed in amongst it.

Print:Giclee on Fine Art Paper

Size:10 W x 8 H x 0.1 D in

Size with Frame:15.25 W x 13.25 H x 1.2 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.