Homestead 1862- 2020, Variation 1

Homestead 1862 – 2020, Variation 1
  • Oil on Canvas
  • 36″ x 24″
  • $4320
Giclée (digital) Prints
Small – image size – 15” x 10” - $195
Medium – image size – 21” x 14” - $295
Large – image size – 33” x 22” - $395
Taxes and shipping cost will be added.
To order, go to the Contact page on this website and email or call. Give me the title 
and size of the print you desire. I look forward to hearing from you. 
Homestead 1862 – 2020, Variation is a treatment of the same themes found in 
my painting for the Department of the Interior in Washington, DC,
Homestead 1862 – 2020. Rather than a Native American village, you see a young
Native American family forced to migrate because of the influx of settlers looking 
for opportunity. A prairie fire lights up the night and a fingernail moon hangs 
above the smoke. A Native village is silhouetted on a bend in the river and a bison 
herd heads away from the wagons. Carrying hopeful settlers, the wagons are back-lit 
by the setting sun. A train brings more homesteaders. The Dust Bowl is represented
behind the farmer's tractor as he plows the deep-rooted prairie to plant annual crops. 
In front of her homestead cabin a mother cooks on an open fire while her children 
wait patiently in the wheel barrow. Clothes hang on the line, chickens and chicks 
are in the yard. A Great Blue Heron soars above the Heritage Center at 
Homestead National Monument of America. A mile or so to the north of the park 
and view-able from the park is an industrial site for farm chemicals owned by the 
Koch Brothers. Evidence of the path farming took after WWII. That industrial site 
is noted on the river to the right of the Heritage Center image. Sandhill Cranes 
cruise up the river and are reflected in water after landing. Barbed wire is 
indicated below the Heritage Center and to the left. Modern farming techniques 
are illustrated in the lower left of the painting: mono-culture, confinement 
operations for animals, feedlots, irrigation. Farming techniques that have led to 
some tragic environmental conditions for life, human and other. The annual 
wheat plant root system can be compared to the perennial grain' root system 
developed by the Land Institute, called kernza.

The right side of the painting shows a young researcher holding seeds of the kernza plant. 
The book shows not only the grain's name but ECO and HOME. For the Ecosphere 
program available at the Land Institute where folks are learning to re-establish a 
connection with the land, a homecoming of sorts. The Berry Center in KY encourages 
similar cultural ways of being as does the Kansas Rural Center. A bison skull sits 
outside to entrance to a coyote den. A rabbit races for cover as a Red-tailed hawk hunts. Bugs, fossils 
and prairie plants are indicated.

I hope you're able to visit Homestead National Monument of America outside of Beatrice, NE.
When walking the old hedgerow, where in September you may see hundreds of Monarch 
butterflies hanging like colorful leaves from the Osage Orange trees, you'll find 
Aldo Leopold's meaningful quote on an interpretive panel west of the Heritage Center. 
It's an oft quoted statement from his A Sand County Almanac. 
“We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see 
land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

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