At a centuries-old farm in Chatham, an artist from New Jersey discovers she’s part Hudson Valley farmer at heart.
When you’re driven by a deep, innate urge to create, cultivate, and propagate, you do it any way you can. “I started growing from seed in my bathroom,” says artist Jill Duffy, recalling the time before she and her husband purchased a 210-acre farm in Chatham; before she had “space and sunshine to grow.”
Only the third family to preside over the land, Duffy discovered it a few years after moving to the Hudson Valley from the suburbs of Northern New Jersey, where she was raised; her husband is from a working-class fishing community in coastal Connecticut.
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With their two teenaged sons, they share the property—which has been continuously farmed since it was colonialized 225 years ago—with a couple hundred chickens, three pigs, about 20 goats, a fellow farmer’s beef herd, and rows and rows of vegetables, herbs, and berries that Duffy started from seed. “I love feeding the people I love the things I’ve grown.”
Alongside six to eight dozen tomato plants, root veggies, seemingly limitless leafy greens, beans, basil, and nearly 800 heads of garlic—in both the fields and the greenhouse—Duffy also plants plenty of flowers and greenery that she fashions into pigment, paint, and ink using ancient techniques, historical recipes, and all-natural materials.
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As she learned, through extensive trial and error and a weeklong dye intensive in London, fermenting the green leaves of the indigo plant will eventually yield that dizzying, recognizable shade of blue. “It’s just incredible to me,” says Duffy. “It feels indelible, it’s so rich in history.”
Indigo aside, her favorite natural pigment is ochre, which she created after stumbling upon a pile of bricks that turned out to be from the original 1800s farmhouse. As bricks are traditionally signed by the brickmaker, it didn’t take much to determine that they were mined along the Hudson and made in Stuyvesant, just 11 miles up the river from her farm. “They are foundational…a deep connection to the land, a sense of place, and the women who stewarded the land before me.”
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Lush indigo, brilliant ochre, and a host of other vibrant and earthy pigments, watercolors, and inks have made it onto multiple canvases—spun from the farm’s flowers, leaves, soil, nuts, rocks, bricks, and more—which Duffy hopes to exhibit someday. In the meantime, she takes commissions for her abstract art, and is especially interested in painting with color she’s mined from a patron’s own property. “Color is a conduit for connection and a story, and it translates into a painting.”
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Calling her property and newfound passion Farm & Field, Duffy hosts workshops in DIY pigment making, which take place in an old dairy barn that’s been fashioned into a proper artist’s studio—flush with endless jars of natural paint, tools of the trade, and walls lined with swatches of handcrafted color.
Daylong sessions include a farm-to-table lunch of her making, served out in the field or inside the greenhouse. Sometimes she whips up a hearty bean and vegetable soup or a savory grain salad with farm-fresh veggies; other days, sliced heirloom tomatoes, seasoned simply with sea salt, olive oil, and fresh basil, are served with local cheeses and her parsley lemon pesto spread atop hunks of crusty, local bread. “The table is an entry point for connection,” says Duffy. “Having a meal with color and food growing all around you creates a connection back to the land and to each other.”
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Although Duffy says she never imagined herself living on a farm and stewarding a piece of land, “it is truly home, and it feels like life’s work unfolding.” And while she admits it requires hard work at times, “I hope we can inspire others to think about connection and community in this disconnected world we live in.” And if any resulting conversation becomes a little extra colorful, all the better.
