The painting titled Farm Near Frytown has been accepted into juried exhibition for the 2022 Iowa State Fair Fine Arts competition. The Iowa State Fair runs from August 11 - 21, 2022 in Des Moines, Iowa.
The work features a stately white barn and towering grainaries. Frytown is a tiny, unincorporated hamlet 10 miles southwest of Iowa City, Iowa. It is quintessential Iowa. Rich, rolling farmland abounds. Drive down ‘Orval Yoder Turnpike’ (that’s an actual road) or Angle Road SW, and you might see an Amish buggy or two. A friend who grew up just down the road from Frytown said that this painting “brings back sweet memories of riding my bike in to get a bottle of pop at the gas station.”
As a boy, I had a similar experience. I grew up in Center Point, Iowa, 54 miles north of Frytown. My friends and I would ride our bikes down Washington Street, past the L.J. Dennis & Son grain elevator and the old railroad depot, down to Rhinehart's Skelly for a 16 oz. glass bottle of ice-cold RC Cola, Dr. Pepper or Orange Crush. It was liquid nirvana on a dusty summer day, for a mere 35 cents. Quintessential Iowa? You bet.
I started the canvas on Jan 26, 2021, but it’s based on a photo I took 2-1/2 years earlier, while on RAGBRAI, the annual bike ride across Iowa. While I was off-route, I passed this farm west of Frytown. I was so impressed by the scene, I had to turn around and go back. I snapped a photo that I knew would make an interesting painting.
Original photo for Farm Near Frytown.
Clearly there is a sense of nostalgia and appreciation of rural America in Farm Near Frytown.
My goal was to monumentalize a common moment of everyday life on an Eastern Iowa farm. Pristine barns like this are becoming more rare in the Midwest every year. But this painting isn’t all smiles and sunshine. There is a bit of drama going on, and perhaps an unsettled feeling. Many areas of rural America have seen better days, and this painting reveals hints of this. A tumultuous sky, paint peeling from a towering old grain elevator, and the shadows of clouds in the foreground all signal that trouble may be on the horizon.
I decided to apply the same angular treatment and delineation technique from my geometric abstraction style of Abstract I, but with a more realistic subject. It was a challenge to render the organic elements in an abstract style, without reverting back to my realist-painter sensibilities too much. Yet I was able to take a tangle of nondescript bushes in the foreground and give them movement and character. They could almost be a successful painting by themselves.
Close-up of bushes in the foreground of Farm Near Frytown.
Admittedly, I took some artistic license with Farm Near Frytown. Normally, a soybean field is dark green at the end of July in Iowa. But I didn’t want green to dominate this canvas, so I ‘sped up the harvest’, so to speak. This is closer to a September-October field, where I could embellish the work with deep golds, reds, oranges and purples. I am a big fan of work by Edward Hopper, but there may be some Grant Wood influence in Farm Near Frytown.
“What you see in this painting is the way I see the world: Beautiful, and strangely compelling.”
Could I make this painting look exactly like the photograph? Sure.
But what’s the fun in that? A photo is a photo. While photos can be a helpful reference, they often lack something enigmatic—that 'special sauce' that makes you want to look deeper. Visually, a photo may seem to reveal everything, but in doing so, it often misses what lies just beneath the surface. It was important for me to capture this scene with paint on canvas, to show more than what a mere photo can provide. What you see in this painting is the way I see the world: Beautiful, and strangely compelling.
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Production notes: (for my fellow artist-friends) I toned the canvas (imprimatura) with a combination of Yellow Ocher, Burnt Umber and Ivory Black. I stayed close to a Zorn’s palette with this work, but added Ultramarine Blue and tiny hit of Brilliant Blue for the sky. The limited palette of earthy colors (Yellow Ochre, Vermillion [or Cadmium Red Medium], Burnt Umber, plus Ivory Black and Titanium White) create beautifully harmonious color combinations that have a remarkable range. (If you’ve never used a limited palette, I encourage you to give it a try). I also used Utrecht Acrylic Gel Medium (matte) to create blends and glazes.