Work in Progress - Farmall Tractor

I've been playing with this new painting depicting an old Farmall tractor.  I have a soft spot in my heart for these tractors, since Dad had one on our 120 acre dairy farm, and he's sometimes let me drive it.  Farmalls were manufactured by International Harvester, and were common on small and medium sized family operations. I painted this from a reference photo I took at the recent Walworth County fair, a place that also is nostalgic for me.

There is a local painter who often paints pictures of tractors, and I emulated her style here, with exaggerated color, simplified forms and abstracted backgrounds.  This is the acrylic layer where I work out my composition and play with color.  When the painting feels about right to me I paint over this layer with oil paint, making alterations along the way.

UPDATE - This is how the painting finally turned out, oil over acrylic.  I pushed values more, and added some magenta to the cool areas on the tractor.

Summer's End

Labor Day weekend has always meant the symbolic end of summer for me.  Since I was a Walworth county farm girl, that meant the fair.  The end of August seems to me to be the perfect time for a rural fair, since now is the high season for produce.  I still enjoy wandering through the agricultural building to see boxes of dented seed corn, onions, apples and various squashes.  Then there are the tall tall stalks of corn, and the giant pumpkins.  I also like looking over the floral displays, the little centerpieces all centered on some theme.  Who makes centerpieces any more? I didn't see what I used to enjoy when I was a child, row upon row of gaudy gladiola spikes and giant dahlias.  Perhaps they were in another building I missed.  There is a lot to take in at the fair.

I went on opening day, before the midway opened.  It was sunny and not too hot, perfect really.  Lots of buildings still had judging going on, at least in the open class areas.  The 4-H  judging was complete, so all the art projects, woodworking, posters explaining electrical circuits or the life cycle of bees, sewing projects and plates of cookies already had ribbons or stickers.  But the adults were seated anxiously on park benches, watching panels of judges make hard decisions.  Hearts ready to be broken were worn on each sleeve.

My parents never let me take animals to the fair.  Mother said something about not wanting me to sleep in the barns, but I don't think anyone ever does that.  I suspect they just didn't want the hassles of transporting an valuable animal to the week long event, and the daily responsibility that entails. Still, I think I might have liked fussing over a cow, learning to show her. 

I walk through the dairy and beef barns, but I have grown to look forward to the goats.  We never had goats, but I like their gregarious nature.  Many of them seem to look forward to their visitors, and sniff and delicately nibble the hand that isn't feeding them.  Almost all seem to enjoy having their ears scratched, pretty much like my cat does.

Then there is food.  When I was a child I looked forward to hot buttered sweet corn, at the tent with salt shakers suspended by strings for easy access.  These days I don't bother with the corn, but head straight to the cream puff stand.  The one I favor is in the row with the 4-H building, the fair office, and the agriculture building.  The stand is ancient, wood clapboard painted white with blue trim, and it looks like it has been there since the 1920s.  Actually they sell eclairs, brownies and cream puffs, but I am a cream puff only woman.  No drizzled caramel or nuts, please.  Just a sweet pastry filled with whipped cream and dusted with powered sugar.  Wear light colored clothing when tackling one of these babies - the sugar shows less when you've finished.

Alas, I think I am too old for rides.  Maybe if I had a wee child in tow I might, but I don't.  I have to enjoy all that going round in circles vicariously. In truth, my stomach might not be a strong as it used to be, especially after eating a cream puff.  I just wander the midway, nodding at the carnies, and taking pictures when I can.

The fair is a fine way to usher out summer.  The sweet thing for me now, is that I do not have to go to school on Tuesday. 

Capping Off Summer

 Dubuque Museum of Art - with huge statues to the left

Summer seems to be winding down here in southern Wisconsin.  The evenings are getting cooler, the nights filled with the sounds of crickets, the flowers looking tired and ragged.  My husband celebrated his birthday this week, and his desire was to take a multiple day bicycle ride home from the Mississippi River.  The weather forecast for the week looked good, so we drove west to Dubuque, and stayed over at the Hotel Julien Dubuque - very nice indeed.  Then he took his bicycle off the rack, hooked on the panniers, and left for a ride that included a side trip to the Quad Cities, a total of nearly 3oo miles by the time he returned home yesterday.

I had wanted to see the Dubuque Museum of Art, but it was closed on Monday when we arrived, so before I left Tuesday I waited around for it to open.  I wanted to see both their current exhibit of folk art, and their collection of Grant Wood art.  The museum opens at 10 o'clock, so I had time to sit in the park across the street and sketch the giant American Gothic figures that stand near the entrance.

My quick sketch of the statues - complete with a giant suitcase

The original Grant Wood painting, taken on a recent trip to the Chicago Art Institute

Before coming back home I drove north on the Iowa side of the Mississippi to McGregor, where I had made arrangements to be outfitted as a Victorian lady for a couple upcoming events with our historical society.  River Junction Trade Co. is a wonderful place, two stores, one for men and another for women.  It is filled with everything a historical society docent or re-enactor could need - hats, shoes, fans, dresses, undergarments, jewelry, anything.  I ended up with a walking skirt, mutton-sleeve shirtwaist, belt and cape.  I'm still considering what to do for a hat, but I had reached the full amount I had budgeted.

Mel helped me select clothing appropriate for a Victorian lady. My outfit is considerably less flashy than hers!

I had some time once I got home to read, water the garden, and take my annual trip to the Walworth County Fair.  It was hot, so I was not too surprised to find the midway uncrowded.  Or perhaps it was just because it was a weekday, and most adults were working.  Being retired, I not only got in for a reduced admission, but got to visit on a day the building were almost empty, and no lines at the stand with pork sandwiches, or cream puffs.  

It was crowded for the pig races, though.  These little porkers seem more than happy to scramble for the chance at an Oreo cookie.

I enjoy the fair, seeing the garden produce, the 4-H projects, the antiques.  I like wandering through the barns, seeing kids washing and brushing their cattle, feeding their chickens or rabbits, showing their goats or sheep.  But it always feels a little sad too, remembering how the fair was always a place to win ribbons, meet friends, ride the rides, mooch quarters off my dad or grandfather, who always seemed to be there too.  I did see one friend from school at the fair, but all in all, I felt a little like Rip Van Winkle, unrecognized in a familiar but changed place.

Back to the Fair

The Walworth County Fair is back in full swing.  I took myself on Wednesday, before it was too terribly hot, as it turned out to be on Thursday.  Almost none of the original reasons I loved the fair as a child have any relevance to my adult self.  As a kid I loved going to the fair because there were crowds of people, and I knew most of them.  I could wander through any barn and find several 4-H friends, or kids I knew from school.  I could mooch a quarter off my grandfather, who reigned over one busy corner in a seed-corn tent with sample stalks tied up along one wall.  I could ride the Ferris wheel, Tilt-a-Whirl, or swings until vertigo compelled me to flop on a bench.  I always had 4-H projects to watch during judging (the small cash premiums were nice) , or at least once a style show in which to participate.  I ate a fair amount of Malone's salt water taffy in my day too.

But times change, and the fair has come to mean something different.  It looks pretty much the same, with old white clapboard buildings housing the fair office, the cream puff stand and the Methodist dining hall.  Some of the old wooden building are gone, replaced by metal pole buildings. The old wooden horse barns burned years ago, as did the grandstand, though the latter was rebuilt in a probably safer way.  The smell is the same too, a bit of fried food, some grilled sweetcorn and barbequed pork, a bit of dust (or some years mud), of cattle and swine, of sweaty people.  But I seldom see anyone I know.  Maybe they are there, but I just don't recognize them, disguised as well all have become, by years.  I like walking through midway, watching the excited kids lined up for rides, the bored looking carnies slumped at controls or double checking harnesses.  I don't ride any more; I just take photos, hoping to some day use them as a reference for painting.  Carnies don't like being photographed.  Any time I ask they turn me down, so sometimes I just snap quickly and hope to capture them leaning amongst their giant stuffed toys and bowls filled with goldfish.  The man who ran the camel ride concession confided to me that some of the carnies have run afoul of the law and don't want their pictured published anywhere.  They're safe with me - no one will ever recognize them from my paintings.

This year I bought my fresh cream puff from the nice men wearing paper hats and aprons at the Knights of Columbus stand, and did a reasonable job of eating it without getting powered sugar all over myself. I snapped pictures of the camels, the little racing piggies, kids on rides, and wary chickens in the small animal barn.  Then I was hot, footsore, and maybe a little lonesome for my grandfather, long dead, and my old friends, unseen, so I walked back downtown to my parked car and headed back home.

Fair Album

Click on this picture to enlarge. I only noticed the sign in the upper left corner after I loaded it on the computer. Too funny!

Yesterday while my husband was away on one of his epic bicycle rides, I drove to Elkhorn, my hometown, for a visit to the Walworth County fair. I have a nostalgic affection for this fair, since I exhibited muffins, cookies, banana bread, some really bad sewing, and a few watercolors there many years ago as a Sugar Creek 4-H member. Grandpa Pierce, leaning on his cane, held court in the Simons hybrid seed corn tent, taking orders for the upcoming season and chewing the fat with other old-timers. Grandpa was always good for quarters for midway rides to get us kids out of his hair. Later, when my dad sold John Deere tractors, we hung out in that area.

These days I hardly see anyone I know at the fair. A couple years ago I got my sister to come wander around and eat roasted sweet corn with me, and once in a while I see a former classmate. If I'm lucky I find my brother in the farm equipment area like Dad used to be, though yesterday he was working at the store. I spied a former rival from another club (now matronly woman), introduced myself, but it was clear she did not remember me. I, like Rip Van Winkle awakened after years only to learn he has gray hair, am no longer am part of my old community.

So I headed to the animal barns.

I love the critters, from the cows, to the pigs, to the sheep and goats. In the middle of the days most animals were napping, trying to ignore all the folks wanting to scratch their ears. This pig was awake, though his neighbor was sound asleep, grunting softly, running in his sleep.

The food hasn't changed much, lots of sugar and fried foods. I love the taffy stand, though I know that a $5 bag of sugar isn't what I need. I did get an order of quesedillas and a horchata, and later bought a mammoth cream puff to bring home and split with my skinny husband.

It's fun to watch the little children on carnival rides. When I was a kid we paid for rides with coins, not coupons, and you could usually get enough change for another ride by rummaging around the seats where centrifugal force wedged them in the back crevices. I took this photo by accident, just pressed the button by mistake, but the crazy angle sort of captures the feeling of the ride.

My last stop on my way out of the fairgrounds was at the camel ride. I chatted with the man running the operation, and asked him if the camels were cousins to llamas. They are, you can see the family resemblance in their faces. Asked if he thought the camels minded walking around in a ring with folks on their backs, he smiled and said this was an easy office job compared to carrying, say, salt across a desert. These camels lie and work in Wisconsin, and the Elkhorn fair is almost the end of their season before winter.

There lots more, arts and crafts, the horticulture building, the grandstand with sulky races and tractor pulls. I enjoyed the trip, a traditional end-of-summer activity in this part of southern Wisconsin.

Godzilla! and The 64-65 World's Fair

Unisphere, New York World's Fair, 1964

Here's a postcard of the same event

I was thirteen when I took this snapshot at Sinclair Dinoland at the World's Fair

Here's what I did with a scanned copy of the old photo and a vintage German postcard.

Pretty soon this mania I seem to have acquired should play itself out.  Besides vintage line art from old textbooks, I have thousands of personal snapshots I have scanned.  The image of a vengeful lizard taking out a city isn't new, but I have a story about this one.  When I was thirteen my grandparents took me by Amtrak to New York City.  I was thrilled.  We rode the subway, saw Barefoot in the Park with Robert Redford, ate cheesecake at Sardis, and spent a couple of days at the World's Fair.  I particularly remember the Wisconsin exhibit (the world's largest cheese), a Disney animated display that sang It's a Small World After All, and the Michelangelo's Pieta, viewed from a moving walkway, and an ultramodern Kodak pavilion with a huge movie screen that foreshadowed Imax.  We also went to the Sinclair Dinoland. That area featured life-sized fiberglass dinosaurs and had sidewalks edged with lava rocks. I backed up with my Brownie camera to take a photo of the T-Rex.  I didn't feel anything at first, but then a woman tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I knew I was bleeding. Sure enough, I had lacerated my ankle on the sharp rock, and my canvas flat was soaked.  Dinosaurs can be dangerous.

Sketchcrawl

pen and ink, watercolor, finished while chatting with online friend, Teri, this week

July is history, and we're heading into August.  The weeds are winning out in my flower beds, and I water the potted plants with less enthusiasm than I did in June.  Since it it dry (flood waters having receded leaving lines of scum and acres of dead grass) the mosquitoes are marginally less evident than a few weeks go.  The cicadas have begun their electric thrumming, but there are fewer fireflies lighting the back yard than there formerly were. The wasps are winning the contest with the hummingbirds for the bottled sugar water in the hanging feeders.  Note to self - buy some of those bee traps for the deck.

We're heading into a month I used to enter with mixed feelings.  August always means our county fair, though the past few years I've gone and not recognized a soul.  It's the month of my husband's birthday and our anniversary.  It also used to be the month when I had to try to ignore back to school advertising, and begin thinking of my return to the classroom.  No more. Summer can last for me until frost kills my flower beds.  It's not over until the last blossom drops, and that won't be in August.  As for the heat, I decided years ago that I would only complain about one season, and I picked winter.  

It has been a while since I posted a poem, so today I offer Sunflakes.

Sunflakes

by Frank Asch

If sunlight fell like snowflakes,

gleaming yellow and so bright,

We could build a sunman,

we could have a sunball fight, 

we could watch the sunflakes

drifting in the sky.

We could go sleighing

in the middle of July

through sundrifts and sunbanks,

we could ride a sunmobile,

and we could touch sunflakes--

I wonder how they'd feel.