Setting up a Roadside Easel: Part 1

Text and Images contributed by Mike Shatilla

Here’s what I do:

As an emerging artist based in Milton, over the past year I’ve found myself returning to one subject: barns.

Not just any barns but the weathered, working, and sometimes forgotten barn scenes scattered across rural Ontario.

I didn’t grow up working the land. I’ve never baled hay. I’ve never milked cows at dawn. I’ve never spent a full day in a field. But farming is still in my blood.

My grandfather was a farmer in St. Mary’s Ontario. His life was tied to the rhythms of the land planting, harvesting, repairing, enduring. Even though I didn’t follow that path, I feel connected to it in a quieter way. Painting barns has become my way of reconnecting to something inherited but not lived.

Why Barns?

Barns are more than structures. They’re markers of time. Across rural Ontario, you’ll see them standing alone against open skies some proud and upright, others leaning, collapsing, slowly returning to the earth. Each one holds decades of seasons in its beams: winter snow piled high against its doors, July heat baking its boards, autumn shadows stretching long across harvested fields.

When I paint them, I feel like I’m preserving something that’s disappearing. Farmland is changing. Properties are sold. Old buildings are torn down. Modern structures replace hand-built frames. Every time I set up my easel on the side of the road, I know the scene in front of me might not look the same in the years to come.

To be continued. Please watch for Part 2.

Mike Shatilla  | Design Guru t: 905.636.9676 | c: 416.890.2333 @paintings_by_mikeshatilla

To all OBP blog readers: If you have not already done so, please support not-for-profit, volunteer-run, Ontario Barn Preservation by becoming a member! Also, if you are in the business of repairing, reconstructing, engineering, designing, etc. old barns, please consider advertising your amazing skills on our Barn Specia-List. If you own an old barn that you would like to offer to someone else, or you are hoping to obtain one for your own project, make use of our Barn Exchange page. If you own an old barn and would like to save it in the virtual world for future old barn lovers, historians and researchers, check out our Your Old Barn Study page. And please send us your own barn story, photos and/or art for submission as a OBP blog posting for the enjoyment and education of all barn lovers! info@ontariobarnpreservation.com