barn roof paintings

Some time ago, after quite a few photos of barn 1, from the initial meeting of it, to its outer skin being removed, to  the grid structure made ready for the plastic corrugated sheeting in the summer of 2009, with the huge help of Niall and Olive, we were regularly brought back to the performativity of this roof, via the sun dancing over it, the snow drifts slipping off- sometimes quickly, sometimes in slow rows slipping off. The sound of it would be fleeting, as if a tree was falling in the forest, for no one to hear, yet sometimes one did. Was it in fact a tree or was it the roof?
At night when the lights were turned on inside it was a ghostly lantern in the landscape.

Having dug out photos from the Ranch archive, I compiled a collection of seasonal portraits and sent them off to Gabor for a second opinion, while researching for others who may have painted, designed, patterned or evoked this opportunity 'to be viewed'. It seems in America this roof canvas can be encountered with large ducks, a dalmation, horses and Mickey Mouse criss-crossing as advertising billboards of sorts since the Depression. It seems this advertising technique may have started with the love of the automobile in Tennessee and Rock City founder* Garnet Carter painted by Clark Byers:

Since 1935, Rock City barns have stood as genuine highway Americana, their bold white-on-black signs compelling both snowbirds and Sunday drivers to a spot near Chattanooga, Tennessee, where they could “See Rock City.”
Depression-weary Americans were just rekindling their love affair with the automobile when a marketing brainstorm by Rock City founder Garnet Carter turned some country barns into billboards that spread the word about the attraction’s charms.

http://www.seerockcity.com/about/barn-history 

Returning to the Ranch, where few would see, let alone hear the barn roof, Gabor promptly returned the images in this listed grid of the these captured performative views. 

* Rock City surrounds 'Lookout Mountain' and seems to have been visited  and most likely named by the Cherokee tribe 'two mountains looking at each other'. Sadly I am not an expert here, but as a natural outcrop of a variety a stones and geological formations the mythological resonance can also be heard through various stories found of being able to view the horizon uninterrupted possibly 270 deg.

On the other side of the spectrum, 'roof paintings' revealed examples on the interior, churches and court houses (New York City Court of Appeals Building. Painted by Eugene Savage 'The Romance of the Skies') with the oculus at the top of its dome, as it did for me one evening at the Ranch. A kind a klein bottle of inside and outside bathed in silence in a cosmological landscape.