Becoming One: Finley I (Mid Spring) Painting

Finley is a wildlife refuge located in the Willamette Valley, south of Corvallis, Oregon. Near the refuge entrance are two adjacent fields. The first is a farmed rye grass field. The second is a restored wetland prairie. In 2011, the rye grass field began to undergo a long restoration project, returning it to native wetland prairie. Because the two fields are adjacent to each other, I became interested in tracking the restoration process. I wanted to see how long it would take the restoration project to create an ecosystem that would mirror the color palette of the existing wetland prairie. The system I devised to describe the restoration process organizes the color palette of each field from the most prevalent colors on the top of the paintings to least prevalent colors on the bottom. The left side of each of the paintings refers to the colors of the rye grass field; the right represents the existing wetland prairie. I visited the fields several times each season to track the progress of the seasons and the restoration.