I have a long history of painting things. Often my favorite things to paint have great bone structure but are under appreciated, ready for second lives. Tobacco sticks personify this potential. Solid, evocative, architectural. Marvelously tactile, slender, weighty. Once farm tools, now repurposed as enchanting canvas. Scepter or staff? Or accent mark to a lucky interior.

The Daffodil Stick is a forerunner for all the sticks I’ve done. It was a thank you to my friends on the farm where the tobacco sticks came from. Every spring daffodils fill the landscape at this farm and with joy and love they’re shared with friends and community.

One year after first spotting the sticks in the barn under years of dust and taking six home to my studio to paint they won the Greenwich Village Crafts & Fine Art Festival award for use of recycled material. No one had ever seen an individually painted tobacco stick.

Here is a link to some of the Daffodil Stick’s cousins: STICKS GALLERY .