After painting the Terrible Triumvirate, I felt like I needed some kind of relief, that I needed to paint somebody normal, or maybe even someone heroic. I didn't know who that would be, though, so I pondered various icons I could choose, but nobody seemed just right. I opened up my Reference Photos folder and started clicking through it, looking for a face.
The face I found was that of a farmer, in a blue chambray shirt and overalls, with sun-dug wrinkles around his eyes, a white frosting of whiskers on his hollowed cheeks and chin, and a look that said simultaneously, I'm so worn out, and yet I'm looking at this blue sky and these fields and feeling satisfied.
I come from a fairly long line of farmers, although nobody in my parents' generation stuck with it. My mom was the youngest of nine children, and by the time her parents passed when she was 10 and 12, her brothers and sisters had all left their truck farm in Virginia—some for the military (it was World War II), some to get married and start their own households—and there was no money left to keep things going. Others bought the farm, and she lived with a sister for a while, then married an Air Force guy and followed him around the globe for 20 years before settling in the "Inland Empire," otherwise known as Riverside, California.
My dad was the middle child of five, and although his parents owned a good-sized farm in Oklahoma, his mother had bigger plans for her children. The two eldest, the girls, went to school and became school teachers; Joe (my dad) ran off at 17 and joined the Army Air Corps; and the two little boys, 10 years behind the other three, also taught, one in high school and one in college. Grandmother and Granddad sold the farm and bought a couple of acres in town, where Allie grew corn and beans and strawberries and Granddad went to local auctions and spent their money on whatever took his fancy that week. So except for a few visits to their farm when I was very small, I was never immersed full-on in that life. My dad eventually retired from the Air Force and became a house builder, so I know more about dry wall and paint than I do about farming.
I did pick vegetables with Grandmother, I did can them, I did ride horses and feed chickens with Granddad, and I eventually learned to quilt (though long after I could have learned something from Allie, sadly), and I have a few fruit trees, an herb garden, some summer tomatoes, and a zucchini plant or two on my suburban lot, but that's the extent of my industry.
I think the farmers—particularly the ones who hold on year after year against the wiles of the major farming corporations trying to add more land to their empires—are heroic. It's a profession that is so dependent on random chance, on wind and weather being just right at the just right time, and no matter how hard they work or how carefully they plan, hoard seed, grow fodder, rotate fields, it can all be ruined by one torrential rain or one month of unseasonal heat. So it made me feel happy to paint this guy, who never wears a suit and tie except maybe on Sunday, and who listens to the land, and whose ambitions are small but more important to him and his neighbors and his customers than any exhibited by the Triumvirate in their halls of injustice. I hope he has the sense to vote for the right person in this election, knowing that he is one of those who will receive help and comfort.
Pencil, Daler Rowney inks (Scarlet, Indian Yellow, Purple Lake), gesso, Paul Jackson watercolors, Uniball pen, India ink, on Fluid 140-lb. watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.
