My last painting of 2020 is a tribute to the survivors of the August storm that devastated my home and state. It seems a fitting epitaph for the year just ended.
On August 10, 2020, the midwest was hit by a derecho—a rare inland hurricane. The August derecho was the most costly thunderstorm disaster in U.S. history. Straight-line winds as high as 140 mph were recorded. The storm complex, blamed on four deaths, hit Cedar Rapids, Iowa, particularly hard, cutting power to the entire city for a week or more, and damaging most of its businesses and homes. Over $11 billion in damages have been reported.
A number of farms will never recover. Many huge grain-storage units were demolished by the derecho, with an estimated $300 million in structural losses alone. This grain operation, east of Marshalltown, Iowa, was devastated.
The winds, which lasted 40 minutes or more, laid waste to millions of acres of crops and brought down many thousands of trees. According to early estimates, more than 3.5 million acres of corn and 2.5 million acres of soybeans were affected in Iowa—about 20 percent of the state’s total farmland. Driving west between Cedar Rapids and Keystone, Iowa, one could see that every single farm along Highway 30 was either damaged or destroyed. Barns that had stood for 100 years were reduced to kindling. My central intention was to capture the impact of this natural disaster. The choice of subject matter was endless.
Top photo: Before the storm, September 2019. The bins on the right were the only ones standing after the storm. Below photo: November, 2020. Concrete foundations remain, and little else.
Finding beauty in the devastation
2020 was another tumultuous year for farmers. After trade wars, low commodity prices and bankruptcies, the derecho only added to Iowa’s misery. How could I find beauty in this devastation? I focused on this cluster of farm structures as my subject.
I started this project by staining canvas with paint I made myself. I took waste toner—a very fine grey powder—from the color printer at my office, and mixed with oil paint, solvent and linseed oil. The result was a dark grey base that seemed to fit the mood perfectly. If I could keep waste toner out of the landfill, use it as pigment and turn it into a work of art, that’s a win.
Like the photo of the New York City postal worker, (which became the award-winning painting Fanfare for the Mailman), the reference for Derecho Rhapsody, August 10, 2020 had an unplanned but serendipitous start. With my iPhone, I was able to capture a rough photo of the destruction. Driving by the wreckage at 65 mph did not allow for the best photo, but I was excited by the composition I was able to capture. I was prepared to get a better reference photo several weeks later, but by then, all of the remaining grain bins had been torn down and removed, undoubtedly sold for scrap. The drive-by photo would suffice.
There is something nearly abstract about these silhouetted shapes, the texture of the steel highlighted by dying sunlight. These elements help portray a sense of movement—the wind-blown grass in the foreground to the tumultuous clouds above. The chiaroscuro of the bins, contrasted by the powerful diagonal slash of white, where the steel has collapsed. The color palette is muted, yet dramatic. Warm vermillon and yellow ochre play off the dark, rich alizarin crimson and ‘blauschwarz’, a favorite blue-black paint from Germany.
Despite the dark and ominous clouds, there is something oddly reassuring about the structures in this painting. They are sentinels of steel. Clearly, they have been pummeled by the storm, the large bin imploded, as if struck by a giant fist. Yet that threatening sky also suggests a sunset, the golden hour that proclaims the worst has passed, and we may have actually survived.
Long Shadows On The Short Farm, 2019. Oil on canvas. 30 in x 48 in.
I reached a minor epiphany last year, after painting Long Shadows on the Short Farm. The grain bins that dot the Iowa landscape are more than just structures of steel and concrete. To growers, they represent the outcome of their endless labor—the grain inside is like money in the bank. But in a larger sense, these bins symbolize the very heart and lifeblood of Iowa—our lives and livelihood.
In many ways this painting is an allegory of the year 2020.
This particular bin represents the character of America—bruised and beaten, but still standing. Until it wasn’t.