May 29, 2006 - 11:35 pm
America’s Dairyland as a Building Site

Over the Memorial Day weekend, Rosemarie, Sam and I went on a little road trip.  Among other things, we stopped by to see our friends dairy farmers Erv and Mercedes Wagner.  I’ve known the Wagners for the last fifteen years and for about the last six they have opened their farm to me and graciously allowed me to paint a series of oil paintings about their lives.

The Wagner farm is located in the hill country of south-central Wisconsin and it looks like scenes straight out of a Grant Wood oil painting.  Erv’s father homesteaded the 120-acre farm nearly 100 years ago and he carved out fields and pastures by removing tree stumps with teams of horses.  For much of Erv’s life the struggle was to get needed development, electric service, phone service, good roads.  Now the pendulum has swung too far and too fast in the other direction.  Close to the Wagner farm, in the last year, someone has built a large home very conspicuously perched in the middle of the most beautiful pasture you have ever seen.  Across the road from the Wagner farm the neighbor’s land has been subdivided.  Land that was once a working farm soon will have 24 houses.  America’s dairyland is now a building site.

The irony is once lots of people move to the country - with their suburban lifestyle and city sensibilities - the countryside they craved is little by little execrably altered.

From April 3 - May 20, 2007, I’m going to exhibit my Wagner farm paintings at a show titled “Wisconsin’s People on the Land” at the James Watrous Gallery of Wisconsin Art in Madison.  The exhibition is part of an 18-month examination of agricultural and rural issues with seminars, forums and public policy programs organized by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.  It will be my chance to participate, artistically, in the ongoing discussion about the future of Wisconsin’s rural areas.

My website: www.davidmlenz.com


Image 1:  Sam and the Perfect World, detail ©David Lenz
Image 2:  Photograph of the same view, one year later