About the Artwork
Haystack is pleased to announce its second collaboration with painter and sculptor Kurt Lightner, Spark I, a new limited-edition print inspired by the changing landscape of the Midwest and the quiet persistence of nature.
Born in Troy, Ohio, Lightner has spent more than two decades looking closely at the farms, forests, and working landscapes of the Midwest that shaped his upbringing. His paintings often operate like flashbacks: moments of vivid, concentrated detail emerging from fields of softened, fading recollection.
Behind his childhood home in Troy stands a five-acre wood—a remnant of the original hardwood forest that once covered much of the northeastern United States. Over the years, Lightner watched as the Emerald Ash Borer transformed the landscape: bark peeling from massive trunks, telltale trails tracing the paths of larvae through the cambium layer, and trees gradually reduced to skeletal structures, standing exposed against the sky.
On a cold morning in 2022, Lightner returned to find the forest almost unrecognizable. Massive openings had appeared overhead. Fallen trunks and limbs covered the ground, while trees caught in the branches of others seemed suspended mid-fall, held in an in-between state. Amid the destruction, Lightner noticed the great quantity of light, which he had not seen there in decades.
Spark I emerges from this moment of transformation. Limited to an edition of 30, the work reflects Lightner’s meditation on loss, renewal, and the regenerative life that emerges within the spaces it creates. What first appeared as devastation became an opening—an altered landscape in which light could reach the forest floor and new growth could begin.
