Arkansas Telescope

2017

Acrylic and marble dust on canvas

Frame built by artist

Signed on bottom-right

Canvas: 22 H x 22 W x 0.75 in

Frame: 26.75 H x 26.5 W x 1 in (68 H x 67 W x 3 cm)

At night in the flat Delta farmland of Northeast Arkansas the stars are incredibly bright. With no lights on the horizon, except for perhaps the flashing lights atop a radio tower far off in the distance, it is dark. Very, very dark. In the summer the mosquitoes will eat you alive, but from autumn to early spring the cool nights are a wonderful time to go out with binoculars and look up at the stars.

Arkansas Telescope is inspired from those childhood memories of the colorful celestial sky that I observed from my grandfather’s farm in Walnut Ridge, Arkansas. The particular scene that it depicts is an imagined one. My grandfather didn’t have a grain silo, but there were others nearby. The frame for this painting was created by me using barn wood from my grandfather’s barn which I collected and saved after it had collapsed.

— Terry Smith, 21 June 2017