University Daily Kansan / Friday, December 7, 1990
5B
Crop artist harmonizes artwork and environment
By Mike Brassfield
Richard Quinn/KANSAN
Stan Herd discusses the next image that he will create in a field.
Kansan staff writer
The problems Stan Herd must face when creating his art are the same problems any farmer must face: drought, floods, hail and insects.
Herd, a Lawrence resident, uses the land as a canvas. His paints are the ever-changing, multicolored careens he creates on plant that canvas. His art supplies are used to work the earth: plows, mowers, shovels and his own two hands.
The Absolut Vodka image near Eudora will become a part of the "Absolut Artists" series.
Herd has created eight earth-works, as he calls them, since 1980.
His latest project, on a farm south of Eudora, is an image of an Absolut Vodka bottle of the length of three inches smaller than smaller examples of Herd's croart art.
He has created, among other things, 160-acre portraits near Dodge City of Will Rogers and a Kiowa Indian chief; a 20-acre still life near Eudora of sunflowers, using real sunflowers; a 30-acre still life in Nebraska of an American farm breakfast and, more recently, a 25-acre portrait north of Lawrence of a Sac and Fox Indian.
Herd then designed the earthwork on paper. Next, using a gridding system he perfected while painting large murals on the sides of buildings, he mapped his drawing onto the field.
Herd began work on his largest late-
field piece in early April, when he
worked with the farm's owners to
make up the piece's two main colors.
Herd's giant Absolut bottle, completed last week, will be used in magazine advertisements. Herd said the "Absolut artists" advertising series was known for using such famous artists as Andy Warhol.
As the crops grew, he began carving away the tall, golden oats, exposing the lush, green clover underneath. But after Herd, his three assistants and the farmers planted the field's fall crops — milo, soybeans and wheat — a seven-week drought struck, and they had to scramble to save what they had grown.
"The Absolut artist series has become a very prestigious thing for artists to be involved in," he said. "I can tell you how widen the viewership of my work."
Lucrative art
Although Heard has created crop art for a Michael Martin Murphy country music video and "Late Night with David Letterman," the absolute project is his first major commercial undertaking.
Crop art needs to be expensive, and Herd, who made a subsistence-level living for years by painting anything she could do, was pleased to be getting out of debt.
"I it's nice to be able to do things like go to the dentist and buy insurance." he said "It's nice to make sure you're meant to be the end goal of all this."
Herd said that he recently had received several offers to create crop art on a commercial basis and that he could make a lot of money doing that.
"I'm doing this to get control of my life financially so I can do the projects I want to do," he said. "I have to decide now — and I relish the opportunity — what my art is about. One of the key reasons I did the Absolut project was that I decided that every third field piece I do should pay enough to enable me to do the next two."
Herd said he planned to begin his next earthwork, a portrait near Salina, next week.
A Native American portrait
When he was invited by the Salina Arts and Humanities Commission to create his next earthwork in that area, Herd decided to do a portrait of Carol Cadue, a young American Indian woman.
School, is the daughter of Steve Cadue, a friend of Herd's and a tribal council member of the Kickapoo Indian nation.
Cadue, a junior at Lawrence High
Herd said the portrait probably would be the first in a series of portraits of young native women in their ancestral homelands. Herd was inspired to do the series when he spent two weeks in Costa Rica helping Daniel Dancer, a Lawrence photographer.
Dancer said he was in Costa Rica to take aerial photographs as part of Project Lighthawk, which he is leading to one of the environmental movement."
Project Lighthawk provides aerial services to conservation groups, taking photographs to document the destruction of natural areas, Dancer said. The group also flies lawmakers areas so they can inspect environments where animals were trapped the country at the request of Costa Rican environmentalists.
The January 1988 expedition was Herd's first trip out of the country, and his exposure to native Central American cultures insured him.
"All across the world, you can find little pocket of indigenous peoples that have had their land taken away," he said. "I think that the way that native cultures are currently being treated, both culturally and physically, is our places of birth is reflective of the people who have transplanted them."
Herd said the portrait series, which
might include portraits of women from South America and Africa, would be an expression of the innovation in a woman in a male-dominated world.
"The White, male, European way of doing things has caused untold damage to our world," he said. "What is it inside ourselves that makes us measure ourselves in terms of conquest?"
Herd sees the culture in which he lives as getting further and further away from its connection to the natural world.
Environmental activist
"We have just started to realize what we have done — or more accurately, what we have undone." he said. "We have to hold responsible those who plow up prairies and pollute the rivers."
Herd was one of several Lawrence environmentalists who stood in front of a moving tractor in an attempt to top creeping plowing and destruction of Ekkhava area that was the home of two federally endangered plant species.
"We wanted to make some kind of stand," he said. "This group symbolizes what is happening nationwide. People are angry that we are pushing much of our natural heritage right to the edge of extinction."
Lawrence environmental coalition to ensure that such destruction did not
Besides inscribing his images onto the earth, Herd also paints on a smaller scale, using ordinary brushes, paints and canvases. He created a painting to commemorate and raise money to finance the Meet-The-Bear, a meeting of Soviet and U.S. citizens in October in Lawrence.
"I want to be involved in things that have a positive impact on the society in which I live," he said. "I'm one more voice out there in the world, but I hope to help people understand what we're doing to the Earth."
Herd said he was working with a
Herd laughed, pointing out that it was ironic that, when creating his artwork, he manipulated the ground to serve his own needs. But Herd's desire to create the plants from which they are created, and that's the way he wants it.
Born in the small town of Protection, about 120 miles southwest of
"I like the fact that I use the ground and then give it back to the farmers to be replanted," he said. "It is important to make sure we exist and not leave a permanent trace on the environment. To me, that's art."
Agricultural roots
Wichita, Herd grew up in a farming environment. He moved around to various places in Kansas, Colorado, Texas and Oklahoma before moving to Lawrence in 1863.
Herd said that painting his earth murals helped him satisfy a yearning to return to his agricultural roots.
"For me, my art has always been tied in with a sense of loss I have about my past," he said.
Herd and his wife, Janice, plan to move south of town next year to an old schoolhouse they are remodeling.
Sam Neis Jr., owner of the farm on which Herd created the sunflower life and the Absolut bottle, said she had found the bulbs down and circled the earth mural.
"We just had a Lear jet come through here on its way east," he said. "You could hear it slam down on the brakes and then do a slow circle around — happens all the time."
Aerial photographers such as Dancer and Jon Blum make her'ds work accessible to the non-airborne.
"What I've always liked about Stan's work is that it's in concert with nature," said Dancer, who has worked with Herd for five years. "He uses the living plants to create an image. He likes to change the seasons are documented in the changing texture and colors of the crops he uses."
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