NARRATOR:
Hello, you’ve reached the Seattle Art Museum. To hear from artist Fay Jones, stay on the line.

FAY JONES (ARTIST):
I grew up in New England mostly, in what's now called a mill town, and the painting is actually about my own past; that is me, the woman with the apron. My parents ran a hotel. I worked in the kitchen. When I was in high school, I had a boyfriend who played third base on the baseball team, so this is one of the few paintings I've ever done that’s … has a really very specific story.

The painting is actually very much about that town and the fact that it was a mill town, or the mills were closed. People want to leave a town that has no jobs. You have to figure out a way to get out. I’ve lived in Seattle since 1960, so that part of what's in this … that sort of sad nostalgia is definitely what I was attempting to paint in this painting.

The main thing for me as a painter was to capture the late afternoon light in that part of the world before a thunderstorm, which is something that I miss. So you get a very strange pale green light and then a thunderstorm comes, but before the storm hits, it's extraordinarily beautiful.