Grant Wood and the Return of the Family Farm

Both paintings by Grant Wood 1931

I was thinking about the romanticized images of rural life that typify the paintings of Grant Wood.   And while Wood had an obvious affection for the land and it's bounty, today his paintings portray what seems to be a long-vanished vision of America. 

Back in the 1930's, when this art was created, many Americans found their livelihood working the family farm.  And life portrayed in these images was much more common.  All that changed with the industrialization of agriculture, the growth of Agri-business and the food and farming conglomerates like ADM and Cargill.  A generation ago, the news was all about family farms being auctioned and the loss of a way of life. 

Tyler and Alicia Jones on their farm     Photo:  Leah Nash NYT

Cleaning heirloom beans   Photo: Leah Nash NYT

But this post is about rebirth, not death.  Although, you could argue that new life often arises from ashes.  And so it seems with the new breed of farmer.  

They're young, idealistic, inspired by "foodies" and our new interest in food as well as concerns about how it's produced.  You could even argue this is a values movement, as people question where their food comes from, its' safety, the use of antibiotics and pesticides, and the environmental cost of large scale agriculture.  Michael Pollan could be their patron saint.  A quick window into his thinking can be found at this piece he created on food rules. 

Community Supported Agriculture forges a direct path between farmer and consumer.  The idea migrated here from Europe in the early 1980s. And while it once urged that bigger is better, now even the USDA supports it.  So today, in a new "back-to-the-land" movement, there are farmers growing heirloom vegetables, small batch "artisan" cheeses, grass-fed animals raised without hormones or antibiotics, and other organic originals.  Vermont just initiated a small business start-up award specifically for food and agriculture.  My wife and I are doing a CSA, as are our kids, one in VT, the other in NY. 

Antique gear like this 1950's tractor are again in demand   Leah Nash NYT

A recent NYT piece on the new farmer movement in Oregon describes how they've turned their back on industrialized, mechanized farming in favor of a more hand-crafted approach.  The head of the local grange is 26 and now has yoga classes once a week.  The average age of farmer-members has dropped from 65 to 35.  You can say it's a new way of thinking about what and how we eat, inspired by an old way of bringing food to the table.

Julie Burstein, Chuck Close and Embracing Your Challenges

Julie Burstein

Julie Burstein was Exec Producer of Public Radio's Studio 360 hosted by Kurt Andersen before she left to write Spark:  How Creativity Works.  She and co-author Kurt explore creativity in the interviews they broadcast with artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians and other creative folk.  Recently she recorded a short piece for Big Think on how artists embrace their challenges, using as an example the work of artist Chuck Close.  It's definitely worth a listen.  

Chuck Close self-portrait

Because Chuck Close, famous for his  gigantic, super-realistic portraits, is face blind and can't recognize faces.  And while many of us walk away from that which makes us uncomfortable, Chuck walked towards his challenges.  That was what inspired him to do his art, and Julie tells the story well. 



If you're interested, there's a bio of Chuck Close that gets good reviews at Amazon, called Chuck Close Life.  And it's also worth thinking about embracing those challenges that life likes to put in our path.  You never know where they may take you.

Hidden

Award-winning Reuters photographer Finbarr O'Reilly is embedded with our troops in Afghanistan.  With the ongoing violence, he wanted to photograph something that was more "gentle and quiet." So he decided upon doors and his series is featured on the NYT Lens blog.  

Finbarr O'Reilly

For Finbarr, the doors symbolize "the closed nature of Afghan society, as well as the fact that the United States Marines are tolerated - but not entirely welcomed - by the local population."  I like his photographs for a number of reasons.  There is that sense of something hidden.  The doors are a barrier, and whatever they are protecting is literally walled off from view.  But the simplicity of his images invite us to imagine the untold stories and lives lived behind them.  

Also, he had to capture his images as he passed by.  Finbarr writes, "I had to follow directly in the footsteps of the Marines in front of me and settle for whatever angle was available as we walked through the villages... I also couldn't stop for more than a few seconds... trying to capture these fleeting glimpses of color and creativity."  

The limits imposed upon his photographs are akin to the limits artists place on their creations.  Having focus gives his series a shape and structure. The stark beauty of his doors creates an abstraction that represents a larger theme/idea. That's what makes it interesting to me. In a sense, the doors are like the eyes of a veiled woman.  They keep many secrets.  And yet reveal something of the person within.  

And there's a sense of mystery, too.  Which I find inviting in a work of art -- it draws me in. I can almost imagine myself sitting in the courtyard behind that patterned door, listening to the soldiers passing by.  So little separating us.  Just a door. 

Next Gen Ad Men

The best thing about innovation is how it inspires other great ideas.  There's a great example of that in the announcement of a new Digital Works Institute.  The Institute, which doesn't exist yet, flows out of Boulder Digital Works which was created in 2009 to educate a new generation of digital creatives.  So how did the DWI come into being?  

Kip Voytek

A national contest to launch a new concept for an advertising agency, was won by Kip Voytek with his better idea -- to create a virtual "thought-leadership center."  Okay, ignore the jargon and read on.  He wants to create a national institute in digital arts and sciences with workshops, classes and other educational activities.  As he put it, "Perhaps the biggest challenge our industry is facing today is the huge dearth of digital talent and future leaders.  The most effective digital leaders are collaborative with a broad base of skills, which is hard to find and even harder to cultivate."




Well, that sounds a little surprising.  So what's behind it all?  In the old advertising world paradigm, an art director would team with a copy writer and together they'd develop creative concepts.  Makes sense: words + pictures, and you've got what you need.  Except now there's the whole digital experience of how we encounter and interact with stuff on the web, on our phones, on our tablets, and so on.  Not to mention social networking and all the grouping sites/activities.  And I'm sure you can add your own example of how the digital world is transforming our interaction with it and each other.


But what is the skill base needed to understand, interface and thrive in this new world order?  Well, it's about old world stuff like entrepreneurship, marketing, people skills, words and pix.  And new world stuff, meaning computer skills, website design, knowing a variety of software and the like.  Plus imagination, creativity and the ability to think inside and outside the box.  But few people have such broad ability or even exposure to this business-techie-artsy mashup of skills.  Which is the raison d'etre for the Digital Works Institute.


I'd like to draw a parallel to my experience as a film and video editor.  For being mesmerized by the power of pictures, I was drawn to editing by a fascination with telling stories in a visual medium.  Which meant I learned pacing, how to order shots to create scenes, choosing the right images to convey the story, knowing when to extend the moment, when to shorten it, and so on.  I worked and reworked a sequence until I could turn off the sound and still "get" what was happening from the visuals.  


But after I mastered the craft, my wife Sharon said that if I wanted to continue to grow, I had to start thinking like a producer.  What she meant was I had to expand my thinking beyond how to tell a story.  I had to understand what the client was trying to accomplish, what message they were trying to deliver, who the audience was, and what action was called for.  Know how to turn their ideas into a program.  And create something that would touch the viewer and move them to action.  


Thinking that way helped me develop a whole package of skills: technical, creative, business, entrepreneurial, and communication.  Which is what we need going forward.  After all, creatives are part of a service industry.  


And something similar is behind a concept like Boulder Digital Works.  And soon, the Digital works Institute.  If you want to get a better sense of what they're doing, check out BDW's website.  And most Wednesdays at 5 pm (MST) you can visit their virtual classroom and listen to industry experts talk about the next big thing.  And if you're so inclined, they're taking applications for the graduate program. 

JR Is Changing the Way You See Things

Street artist JR creates work on a grand scale, putting a human face on some of the world's poorest communities.  He might show up in a shantytown or favela, photograph people he finds there, blow up their images and paper their neighborhood with the results.  Where Christo would wrap buildings and bridges to recast a city as a surreal abstraction, JR creates a different cityscape, working with photos of people to construct a heightened reality.  His images celebrate his subjects while insisting on your attention, bringing new meaning to the phrase "larger than life."  There's an enormous sense of humanity there.  

NYT Photo JR in his studio

In a recent NYT article he talked about why he does it:  "I think it comes from several things.  Firstly, a real curiosity about the world.  Then there's the fact that one of the things that touches me most is injustice.  I'm of mixed origins - North Africa, Eastern Europe, Spain - and this generation today, we're all a little bit from everywhere.  I was born in France, but I feel comfortable everywhere - I don't see the borders."


He recently opened his expressionistic film in France, Women Are Heroes.  The trailer is hypnotic as it juxtaposes scenes of daily life in some of the world's most forlorn communities, moments spent with the people who live in them, and speeded-up footage of JR's gigantic photos being affixed to the structures that populate those places.  


He's recently won a TED prize, $100,000 for "one wish to change the world."   Here's a great blog and another where you can see some images of JR's Work.  His work reminds me of James Agee's profiles and Walker Evans' portraits of sharecroppers from the book "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men."  Although separated by years and genres, each found a way to bring attention to people hidden from view.  As JR sees it, "To change the way you see things is already to change things themselves."