ELLENCILLE, New York---Perhaps this will be the year Roger Baker cuts a 50,000-square-meter portrait of John Coltrane, musical notes pouring out of his saxophone, into a hayfield and invites 1,000 saxophonists to show up and play.

　　It is, after all, the time of year when he has to start planning for what must be the world’s largest annual portrait, but he isn’t at all sure what he’ll do this year. Still, as he contemplates this year’s model, people are still reflecting on last year’s.

　　After creating gargantuan field-art renderings of the Statue of Liberty, Albert Einstein and Jimi Hendrix, and a 100,000-square-meter Elvis, Mr. Baker seemed to take something of a departure last year in paying homage to Larry Desmedt, a New York-based custom motorcycle builder and biker, better known as Indian Larry. Mr. Desmedt died in August 2004 when he fell off a bike and hit his head while doing a stunt at a show in North Carolina.

　　But maybe it was not a departure at all, but instead a perfect distillation of Mr. Baker’s combination of art, inspiration and lawn mowing.

　　 “I was all set to do Coltrane,” said Mr. Baker, an artist and sculptor who paints motorcycles, creates antique-looking signs for businesses, and fabricates commercial sculptures when not creating his colossal portraits in the landing field of the Ellenville Flight Park, where he has been hang gliding since 1975.

　　 “I wanted 1,000 saxophone players playing between 10: 30 and 11: 30 a.m., when the sunlight would glint off all the saxophones, and then they could all walk the streets of Ellenville playing what they wanted.”

　　And then, both from conversations he heard while working on bikes or from television reports, he became interested in Mr. Desmedt, a cult figure in the motorcycle world. And things went from there.

　　He designed the portrait, with details as exact as the tattoos on his throat, from photographs of Mr. Desmedt. Then he mapped out the field and the cutting schedule, and worked with friends and helpers using a tractor, power mowers, hand mowers and hand-held weed whackers for perhaps three weeks. Mr. Desmedt’s friends and family, many on motorcycles, showed up in Ellencille around the first anniversary of his death, and those closest to him flew over the site in four vintage open-cockpit biplanes and a Cessna 172.

　　All this began rather casually. Mr. Baker was sitting with Tony Covelli, who owns the landing field, one day in 2000, and the conversation turned to the bull’s-eye target they had carved for hang gliders to land on. Why not something grander, a picture of some kind, Mr. Baker suggested. Almost instantaneously they came up with the idea of the Statue of Liberty as a piece of art to mark the millennium.

　　 “It was just meant to be,” Mr. Baker said. “Everyone who flew over it just went nuts.”

　　As for this year, well, it could be Coltrane. It could be Leonard Bernstein. It could be one of about 16 others, some just ideas, some already sketched out. All, he says, icons who carry and emotional charge for him.

　　“I like people who are legends, people with serious fans and serious toys,” he said.