I’m beginning to thing the third time will be the charm, but the wheat is beginning to take shape.
In November, we went to an exhibit of Van Gogh’s work at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA. For weeks I pored over the book I bought, mentally trying to translate his oils to watercolor. The thing that kept jumping out at me was not just the subject of wheat fields (yes, I have a problem – the intervention is scheduled for summer) but how different the wheat fields were.
Van Gogh’s wheat fields were masses of his familiar swirls, but the fingerprints on the landscape he painted were irregular, with uneven lines. When I look at the fingerprints of humanity on our landscape, machines have carved the lines with a near-perfect geometry and on a scale I doubt he could have imagined.
It got me to really look at the landscape we call ‘nature’ and inspired the theme of an upcoming show (Fingerprints) that will start in April at the Martha Canfield Library in Arlington, VT.