INDIANA CROPDUSTER

Indiana Cropduster, 70 x 77 inch oil and pencil on paper painting by George C. Clark
SOLD to KPMG Corporate Collection, Chicago

I don't usually consider Indiana Cropduster to be part of my "Traveler's Sketchbook" series, but since I did travel to research its subject, I'll tell how I came to paint it here.

In 1976 and 1977 I was working a lot in the medium of oil and pencil on paper, both for my figures and landscapes.  Mostly I was working on 23 x 29 inch sheets of Strathmore kid finish bristol drawing paper.  I had been showing and selling landscapes at the Art Rental and Sales Gallery of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1974.  Usually the gallery didn't want to jury art bigger than 60 inches, but this time they announced a special jurying for wall-hung pieces that were at least 5 x 4 feet, preferably larger.  It seems that one of the city's private social clubs was redecorating their space in a Loop building, and they wanted to buy some big new art.  The gallery gave its artists plenty of warning about this special jurying and I accepted the challenge.

I decided to paint a subject I knew well, the Indiana countryside where my wife Pat's relatives had a big farming operation near Lafayette.  I had painted some of my first landscapes there, as I recounted at the beginning of this blog.  The next time we went there I brought my camera and sketchbook and worked out the composition of this painting.  I decided that what is most characteristic of that part of Indiana is how flat it is and how it has all been gridded up by roads and railroads and almost completely covered by plantings of corn and sometimes soybeans.  I thought of two ways to depict it.  A very wide skinny painting could emphasize the land's flatness, but it wouldn't show the gridding.  I decided instead to use a device I'd seen in the work of two of my favorite painters, Gustav Klimt and Paul Hogarth.  I would keep the horizon very high and look down on the land as if I was 50 feet up in a cropdusting airplane.  The painting would be true and would convey more information than any photograph I could take at ground level.  The old Farm Co-op grain elevator stood along the Monon Railroad track just outside the tiny town of Ockley, about a three-quarter mile walk from the home of Pat's aunt and uncle.  The pick-up truck belonged to Pat's cousin.

The biggest heavy archival paper I could find was handmade Japanese toyoshi paper that came in deckle edged sheets about 42 x 72 inches.  I sliced the deckle off a long side of two sheets and spliced them together using one of the cut off pieces glued across the seam on the paper's back side to secure them.  I then taped my giant sheet to the wall of my studio, a storefront I was sharing with three other artists, and started painting.  

It took me about 3 weeks to finish the painting, although I wasn't working all day everyday on it since I was also working with life models sometimes in the same space.  The hardest part was painting literally thousands of cornstalks leaf by leaf starting at the bottom until they feathered out about two thirds of the way up the painting.  It was worth doing though, because it gave the painting an obsessive quality and was the best way to describe the sheer volume of corn I wanted to depict.

Work presented for this special jurying didn't have to be framed.  I trimmed the painting to 70 x 77 inches and tipped it onto a backing I constructed by overlapping two layers of 40 x 60 inch quarter- inch foamcore sheets that was a few inches larger all around than the painting.  I then wrapped the whole thing in clear acetate for protection, having spliced the acetate with clear tape to get it big enough.

My friend Marilyn Packer knew several artists who were submitting work and she arranged to borrow a bakery truck to deliver the art on a rainy Saturday.  Unfortunately, the back door of the truck was smaller than we expected, and Marilyn's canvas wouldn't fit through it, although the other art did.  She wound up tying her painting to the back of the truck with rope, and I drove right behind the truck with my flashers going because her painting covered the truck's tail lights.  Her painting was a little wet from drizzle by the time we got to the Art Institute loading dock, but it was an oil painting and proved to be undamaged once she dried it off.  We all waited longer than usual for the jury results, and when they came we were all informed that the club had changed its mind and purchased nothing, and all the art would have to be picked up.  The Art Institute was as bummed as the artists were.  I got Indiana Cropduster back and hung it on the wall of my studio.

Flash forward several months, maybe a year...

The Art Institute announced that its big semi-annual juried show, the 77th Artists of Chicago and Vicinity Exhibition, will be limited to "Works On Paper" in 1978.  Is this fortuitous or what?  I now needed to frame Indiana Cropduster, and because I knew any professional framer would charge a fortune to do anything that big, I decided to do it myself.  I constructed a stretcher frame an inch larger all around than the painting out of 1 x 6 inch redwood planks.  Then I stretched linen canvas around the redwood and secured it on the back with staples.  I sized the front of the canvas with clear acrylic medium to make the canvas shrink and tauten, and also to glue the fabric to the redwood where they are in contact.  I used nails and glue to fasten lengths of three-quarter inch square wood molding all around the perimeter of the top surface of the stretched canvas.  The visible surfaces of the molding and the adjacent inch of canvas were painted matte black.  Narrow strips of archival acid-free museum board that would be concealed by the painting were tipped around the outer edges of the canvas, and finally the painting was carefully tipped onto the outer edges of the museum board strips with water-soluble glue.  (The purpose of the museum board strips is to enable the painting to be removed from the frame if ever necessary by popping the strips free of the stretcher without putting undo stress on the paper of the painting.)

I wanted to photograph the painting, but there was no way I could get enough even light on a surface that big to do it inside the studio, so we carried it outside and leaned it against the wall of our storefront.  Pat held it to keep the wind from knocking it over while I stepped back into Sheffield Avenue between passing traffic to shoot 35mm slides of it, which is what you see posted above.

I bought a giant sheet of plexiglas to lay across the black molding risers that would keep it from touching the painting's surface.  I had to fabricate my frame stock out of base molding and big quarter-rounds which I stained and varnished myself because I needed it to have a much wider than normal lip that would cover the molding risers you see around the painting in the photograph.  I paid a framer to cut my frame stock to size on their mitre-saw.  I assembled the four frame segments with glue and small nails, and when we lowered the frame over the plexiglas and stretcher, miraculously, everything fit perfectly.  It had taken several days' hard work, but I had kept my out-of-pocket framing expenses to a minimum.  I paid a "Man with a Van" who  advertised in the local underground newspaper $25 to drive me and the painting to the warehouse downtown where the jurying would take place.  I think I'll save what happened next for another post.