PLOW ZONE

Plow Zone,  24 x 40 inch oil and pencil over acrylic sized paper by George C. Clark    SOLD

Plow Zone is a studio painting of spring plowing in the corn and soybean fields around my wife's late aunt and uncle's farm in Carroll County, Indiana.  I stained a sheet of Japanese Toyoshi printmaking paper a paper bag brown color with an acrylic sizing process I described earlier.  Then I washed in the sky color in semi-opaque acrylic.  The painting was completed with oil paint and Prismacolor colored pencils.  It was purchased in the 1980s for the corporate offices in Desplaines, Illinois, of the Sandoz Crop Protection Corporation, the American subsidiary of Sandoz/Novartis AG of Switzerland.  The American operation was eventually relocated back to Europe, and I have been told its art collection is now in Denmark.

The title Plow Zone is the archeological term that describes the first foot or two of soil in a cultivated field where found artifacts cannot be dated by their depth because you have to assume the earth has been jumbled repeatedly by plows and other cultivating implements.  After a rainfall on recently plowed earth is the best time for archeologists to do a field survey looking for artifacts on the surface as indicators of a site's potential for further study and possible excavation.