ELLENVILLE (New York), June 20 — Roger Baker walked across Beethoven’s hair, down to the left eye and over to the right eye.

There is no question that Ludwig van Beethoven was a larger-than-life figure, one of the greatest composers of all time. And here, at the edge of the Catskills, Beethoven is very big indeed.

The canvas is a huge field where cows once grazed. The artist is a man who was inspired while listening to Beethoven’s piano sonatas on long-playing records that he found at a yard sale. His tools include four tractors.

“Beethoven’s got great hair — what can I tell you?” said Baker, who is a commercial artist and sculptor when he is not creating colossal portraits in grass. “His hair is timeless. It was good back then, and it would go good today. Great image. When you see a picture of Beethoven, you just know who it is. You look at that scowling face, you think, dun-dun-dun-DUH.” There was no mistaking the famous four-note opening of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 (Op. 67), even as he insisted he could not carry a tune.

Artist Roger Baker on the site of his grass portrait of the composer Ludwig van Beethoven, created with lawn mowers in a field on the edge of the Catskill mountains, in Ellenville, New York, June 17, 2016. — Picture by Piotr Redlinski/The New York Times

The likeness in the grass is familiar, based on a painting of Beethoven in his late 40s — middle age, according to the calendar; late period, according to the opus numbers. But Baker’s Beethoven differs from the painting. This Beethoven’s complexion is blemished by woodchuck holes. His right shoulder is cut off by a creek.

And Beethoven’s prominent forehead? “A great place to land a helicopter,” Baker said, after explaining that the height of the portrait is more than 1,000 feet and that it includes only Beethoven’s head and shoulders.

Baker sees Beethoven’s lapel as a great place for a grand piano. A 5-foot-8-inch Yamaha will be trucked in today. A harp arrived over the weekend for a moonlit performance of the Moonlight Sonata. A 40-voice choir from the Ellenville Middle School will sing an arrangement of the Ode to Joy from Symphony No. 9 (Op. 125) today. Their music teacher, Linda Gillette, will accompany them.

Baker has been called a da Vinci of the lawn mower, an El Greco of the grass. He has done large-form cuttings of the Statue of Liberty, Albert Einstein, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley and the motorcycle builder and biker Larry Desmedt, better known as Indian Larry. He also snipped and trimmed an 850,000-square-foot Purple Heart medal.

Beethoven, a high-culture idol, was a departure for Baker, who said he had never attended a classical-music concert. He dabbled with the clarinet and the saxophone when he was growing up on the Jersey Shore. But painting beckoned after high school.

Artist Roger Baker checks a gridded sketch of Ludwig van Beethoven while making final adjustments to his portrait of the composer, created with lawn mowers in a grass field, in Ellenville, New York, June 17, 2016. — Picture by Piotr Redlinski/The New York Times

Now 62, he is a happy straggler when it comes to technology. He still has a flip phone, and he has never — yes, never — used Google. His main research tool is the World Book Encyclopaedia, a 19-volume set from 1956 (those seeking further explanation of what that is can look it up on Google).

That was where he found the image of Beethoven that he adapted for the field. As for the LPs at the yard sale — recordings of the pianist Alfred Brendel — “I paid five bucks for them,” he said.

The records were in perfect condition, he said, and he played them over and over, carefully lowering the needle to avoid scratching the old vinyl surfaces. Before he settled on Beethoven, he considered other famous musicians who happened to have impressive hair: Leonard Bernstein, Luciano Pavarotti, Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, even Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

He pulled Volume 11 — the “M” volume of the World Book — off a shelf and read up on Mozart. He was unimpressed. “Mozart didn’t have the verve,” Baker said. “I look at the portrait of Beethoven and think, ‘dun-dun-dun-DUH.’ Mozart was just kind of standing there.”

So Beethoven it was, and not just the portrait. He sketched the nine letters of the composer’s family name below the image. He decided that ordinary-looking letters were not enough, so he copied Beethoven’s signature. The “B” is more than 90 feet tall. And he got permission to use the field rent-free — it is owned by friends, he said.

An aerial view of mowers in a grass field at the edge of the Catskill mountains where artist Roger Baker has created a portrait of composer Ludwig van Beethoven with lawn mowers, in Ellenville, New York, June 17, 2016. — Picture by Piotr Redlinski/The New York Times

“The field dictated the size of the portrait,” Baker said. “When I do fields, I have to count square feet. Acres, it doesn’t sound as great.” Beethoven covers about 1 million square feet. That works out to 23 acres, given the shape of the field.

Baker figured out a grid system, dividing the field into 100-foot-by-100-foot squares. He subdivided each square into 10-by-10 chunks and waded into the grass, carrying a 3-foot-by-4-foot mock-up.

He planted orange flags, some to mark off squares, some to warn of woodchuck holes. He and his mowing crew assigned nicknames to features of Beethoven’s face that, in extra-large scale, look more like land formations on a map — “Madagascar” for a piece of the collar that had the shape of the island off Africa, “Thousand Islands” for the cravat.

The Beethoven biographer Jan Swafford wrote that when he pictured Beethoven at work, he heard “the scratch of a quill pen on lined music paper.” Baker hears the guttural sound of five grass-cutting machines — “my array of brushes,” he called them. He also described them as “erasers,” but not the kind that remove all traces of whatever was on the surface. “We’re not getting rid of the grass,” he said, “we’re just making it lower.” Blade by blade. — The New York Times