Known for “drawing endlessly” as a kid, artist Jill Duffy has been getting her hands dirty with charcoal, pencil, and paint since her earliest days—but she never envisioned that, one day, she’d dig her fingers into the soil of her own 210-acre farm, mining for materials to make color. “I did not imagine myself living on a farm and stewarding a piece of land, but it is truly home and feels like life’s work unfolding,” she says of the Chatham property she purchased with her husband in 2018, that has evolved into a wellspring for making natural pigment and inks. “While art was always a part of my life, nature was not!”
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 grew up; her husband, who goes by “Duff,” is from a working-class fishing community in coastal Connecticut. “We moved to the Hudson Valley following our nose, or maybe our thirst for the outdoors,” which began when they hit it off as mountain biking buddies in college. “We just fell in love with the area.”
Settling in Warwick, the couple started a family and joined their first CSA. They chose to go the working-share route, unknowingly planting the seed for their eventual role as farm owners. “It was not about getting a discount, but about being closer to our food—it was a total shift in our perspective,” she says, remembering the hours in the “blazing sun” picking black currants, while reflecting on “what a lovely impulse it is for a famer who wants to engage with the community.”
When their eldest son (they have two now; both teens) started kindergarten, they moved across the Hudson River to Chatham, where this budding connection to local agriculture and the land deepened. “We walked to school every day through a nearby farm, which really broadened our awareness and propelled this journey of stewardship,” Duffy explains. When their farm came on the market, they were already sold.
Choosing to leave behind a career in advertising and design in favor of “connecting with motherhood and the outdoor world,” Duffy strolled the pastures and fields of her farm every free moment she had. “The closer I got to the land, the more curious I became about it,” she recalls. “I’m a hands-on, experiential learner, and being so near to plant material and the earth, I organically started thinking, what can I make color from?”
I did not imagine myself living on a farm and stewarding a piece of land, but it is truly home and feels like life’s work unfolding.
Being so near to plant material and the earth, I organically started thinking, what can I make color from?
It wasn’t long before she went down the self-described “rabbit hole” of natural pigment and ink making, becoming fascinated by ancient techniques and materials—some from Egyptian times—that are still used today. She traveled to London for a weeklong dye intensive, which taught her the chemistry of it all and filled her head with a palette of historical recipes, decorated with visions of abstract art brushed with handmade hues.
Back at the farm, Duffy started “growing for color,” as she puts it, planting flowers and greenery that she would eventually, after much trial and error, make into pigment, paint, and ink. She quickly discovered that fermenting the green leaves of the indigo plant yielded that recognizable rich blue “that is just incredible to me,” she says. “It feels indelible, it’s so rich in history.”
While Duffy is the first to acknowledge that indigo “really lights me up,” 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 digging for her to determine that they were mined along the Hudson and made in the late 1700s in Stuyvesant, just 11 miles up the river. “They are foundational; sturdy and heavy. They are a deep connection to the land, to a sense of place, and to the women who stewarded the land before me,” she says. Plus, “that deep rust color always resonated with me.”
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, 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.”
Calling her property and life’s 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.
As for the rest of the farm, she and Duff, along with their two teenaged sons and dogs, share the land—which has been continuously farmed since it was colonialized 225 years ago—with a couple hundred chickens, three pigs, about 20 goats (raised for meat and sold to a nearby Muslim community), and a fellow farmer’s beef herd. Duffy’s small self-serve farm store proffers fresh eggs, locally sourced meats, and vegetables she enjoys growing from seed.
“It’s hard work [on the farm], but 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.
Brilliant color can be spun from plants, flowers, nuts, and even old bricks.
Mark Your Calendar!
Two Farm & Field workshops are planned for the spring, led by Jill Duffy and complete with a farm-to-table lunch of her making, served out in the field (weather permitting) or inside the greenhouse. Visit the website for details, or to request a private session.
Natural Black Ink & Paint Making
March 29, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Connect to the earth through the grounding depth of black. Forage the fields, then get busy in the barn studio creating rich black inks and watercolor and tempera paints from charcoal and botanicals. (Participants may bring charcoal from a meaningful place/fire to incorporate into their work.)
Botanical Ink Making
May 3, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Take a guided walk of the farm and its fields, before gathering in the barn studio to make natural inks from foraged wild botanicals and dried flowers and walnuts.
Related: “Cold Spring, NY” Book Offers an Intimate Look Into the Putnam County Town
