When David Brown moved to his 12.5-acre farm in Old Saybrook in 1986, he achieved notoriety for what seems in hindsight a curiosity: His house is made of hay. Yes, his 12-foot by 20-foot domicile is the oldest such structure east of the Mississippi River. Costing all of $500 to build, the Hay House was constructed of tightly packed, two-foot-thick bales cut from a nearby field, covered with a wire frame and a stucco coating, given a thatched roof and made to resemble a fairy-tale cottage. It has no electricity or plumbing.
Despite the lack of amenities, Brown has managed just fine, as has the house, moving into its fourth decade with only a slight sag to show for it.
“Queen Victoria wore a coat around Buckingham Palace,” he says, with a laugh. “I’m not roughing it. I stay warm enough.”
Somewhat overlooked in the ensuing years is the fact that Brown has established himself as something far more substantial than a roadside curiosity.
He is a skilled farmer and beekeeper, as well as an exceptionally talented portraitist and landscape artist. In recent years, he has had one-man exhibitions at the Florence Griswold Museum, New Britain Museum of American Art and Bridgeport’s Discovery Museum.
Facing another growing season after a harsh winter, Brown is pondering the idea of putting himself out to pasture with his easel and oil paints.
“Now that I’ve turned 60, I am the average age of an American farmer,” said Brown. “I am the only farmer left in Old Saybrook; well, the only farmer selling directly to the public.” (Every Friday after Memorial Day, Brown sells vegetables, cut flowers, eggs, jam and honey from a farm stand on Ingham Hill Road. He also sells at the weekly farmers market in Chester).
Though he looks forward to another harvest at Hay House Farm, Brown has had the property listed on real estate websites for two years to find someone to lease the operation. They would get the Hay House, land, all the equipment, Brown’s accounts and coveted slots at farmers markets.
“It’s a reasonable deal because they could walk in and it would be up and running,” he says wistfully, taking a tug off a hand-rolled cigarette. “And I could be the old kook who lives on the property in a trailer and paints all day.”
It’s not the vagaries of aging or hard work or the relatively Spartan existence that has Brown eyeing the finish line as a farmer. It’s his art. It’s selling. Like the proverbial hotcakes. Or like lattes, espressos and scones.
“A great new thing is happening,” enthuses Brown.
That “thing” is Ashlawn Farm Coffee, which opened a shop in late 2013 next to the train station in Old Saybrook, five minutes from his farm.
The shop is an outgrowth of Ashlawn Farm in Lyme, formerly Harding Farm (ca. 1905) which was revived by a Harding nephew, Chip Dahlke, in the late 1990s. He and his wife Carol opened the Market at Ashlawn Farm to sell vegetables and be the home base for Lyme Farmers Market. As a sideline, Carol Dahlke began roasting coffee and selling beans at farmers markets. She was soon doing so well she opened an Ashlawn Coffee venue in Old Saybrook.
“I was planning my first art show at the shop, and by then, David had become a good friend,” she says. “I wanted him for the first show because he has such a great following. His work looks so good in the shop, too.”
“I’ve sold out two shows already,” said Brown, as if recounting a pleasant dream.
Dahlke then commissioned Brown to create a mural for the shop. “There was a big empty rectangle above the storefront and it was bothering me,” she says. “I told David to drop his commission for his painting sales and paint a mural.”
Last December, the mural was unveiled at a dedication ceremony.
“The dedication of the mural was mobbed,” said Brown. “It was the coolest unveiling, with a sheet over it that Carol pulled off — and everyone gasped.”
Dahlke has now asked Brown to display and sell his paintings in the shop on a semi-permanent basis. “I guess we’re forever bound,” she says, with a laugh.
Local Gallery
Dahlke met Brown in 2002, when he was a vendor at the Lyme Farmers Market.
“I just had this idea of him as the flower farmer who lived in a house made of hay, and I had this image of piles of hay with a chimney,” said Dahlke. “But then he invited us to his Daffodil Brunch and we saw his artwork.”
Brown could not be any happier with the arrangement.
“Basically, I have my own gallery, just around the corner,” he says, tossing a log into his wood-burning heater. “No gallery in Connecticut has the traffic that Carol does. I’m painting frantically to fill the gaps on the wall. My chicken paintings are the hottest, but my sheep are catching up. It’s not what I dreamed of doing but I still invest my heart in it, in my farm art.”
He gets occasional calls from coffee shop customers.
“They’re waiting for the train and want to buy a painting,” he says. “I ask how long before their train arrives, then hop in my truck and I’m there in two minutes. They give me the check, I give them the painting and they hop on their train.”
Passion For Art
Turning to art is no quixotic, late-career hobby for Brown. Over the past three decades, in between his farm chores and teaching gigs, he has pursued his passion for art. The talent was fostered in high school, where instructors told him, “You should do nothing but paint.” However, Brown, who graduated from Dartmouth in 1976 with a degree in geography, took time out to pursue other passions.
“I got on an Asian kick when I was in my 20s, wanted to join the green revolution and save the planet, and thought of art as a luxury,” said Brown, who traveled through Afghanistan and India before moving to Nepal to take a job as a schoolteacher to Tibetan refugees.
Once that urge ran its course, Brown returned to Old Saybrook, where he grew up. When the lease on the Hay House — built by an old high school friend, Ben Gleason — became available, he moved in. The Thoreau-like setting — next to 350-acre Great Cedars Conservation Area, which the Gleason family sold to the town — was in tune with what he’d experienced in Asia.
But this past winter brought more than its share of snow and stiff winds. Parts of his house froze, and the cap of his chimney was blown off. And yet, Brown was probably the only farmer in Connecticut — perhaps the only person in the state — who secretly wanted the winter to last longer. “I have all these paintings to do!” he says with mock panic.
The desire to downshift into art did not suddenly appear. It may have been sparked, literally, by a fire that consumed his studio in May 2007. Though not a subject he’s fond of recounting, Brown feels compelled to describe it.
“I knew the building was lost as soon as I saw the first flames,” he says, sighing. “I was out there right after it started and had just put film in my camera so I took pictures. The inferno of an artist’s studio is like nothing else. There are little explosions as the flames get to the linseed oil, then paint thinner, then oil paints, one after another.”
Most of Brown’s paintings were destroyed, and badly “charred” was an installation he had created — a sort of facsimile of the Hay House — for his one-man museum exhibitions. Framed on the wall of his new studio are two photographs from the fire, next to a haiku-style poem done in Chinese-style calligraphy, “Barn’s burnt down/now/I can see the moon.”
By Nov. 2007, a new barn studio, designed and built by Brendan Matthews, was raised.
“It went up in six hours with the help of 300 volunteers,” explains Brown. “It was Brendan’s 100th barn raising and he said he’d never had one that was easier.”
An Artist’s Living
Even though Brown is fully prepared to throw himself into another farm season, he hopes his art will ultimately take precedence. Looking up from his easel in the studio, he stares out the windows toward his garden. “I should have been planting peas already,” he notes.
Shrugging, he tosses another log in the heater, seats himself in front of his easel, surrounded by three of his five friendly terrier mixed breeds. He excuses himself so that he can get down to the task at hand.
“Is making a living as an artist any easier than making a living as a farmer?” Carol Dahlke muses. “I don’t know.”
Brown says, “I know I will never get rich on my art. Most artists barely make a living, but I’m doing all right now.”
David Brown will host his annual “Daffodil Brunch/Earth Day Birthday Party” at Hay House Farm on Sunday, May 3. Call Brown if interested in attending at 860-575-2387. The farm is at 155 Ingham Hill Road, Old Saybrook. Park in the dirt lot at entrance to Great Cedars Conservation Area. To view a sampling of David Brown’s art, visit davidbrownpaintings.com
