Spark Series I and II
$4,200
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.
Read More- Authentication
All Haystack editions come with a Certificate of Authenticity.
Included in the set
2 artworks, offered together as one complete set.
Spark II
View artwork“A light of great quantity rushing and bathing the ground in ways it hadn’t in decades or centuries. Waking up voids and fissures on the ground as if the morning had finally arrived. With light comes life”
– Kurt Lightner
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 and Spark II emerge 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.
Curatorial Opinion
For more than two decades, Kurt Lightner has drawn from the farms, forests and working landscapes of his native Ohio — mining the familial and the regional for material that, in his hands, speaks to something far broader. Spark I is among the most concentrated expressions of that practice: a work rooted in a five-acre wood behind his childhood home in Troy, Ohio, that arrives at a meditation on loss, light and the conditions under which renewal becomes possible.
About the Artist
Kurt Lightner (b.1971, Troy, OH) is a painter and sculptor whose studio practice is one that examines his family’s history with farming in the Midwest, particularly as it relates to concepts of work and self-worth. With landscape-based visuals, he conveys the importance of his ancestral environment and the significance of generational knowledge.
Read more
