Iowa :: Image – Sanya Vitale
American Gothic – Grant Wood – 1930 :: Image – Chicago Art Institute
Melancholy and Anxiety
I was on a road trip a few years ago that took me west through the entire width of Iowa. I discovered that Iowa’s divided into two horizontal stripes in every direction, the bottom half is green, and the top half is blue, with occasional dark lines and textures interrupting the horizon like cattle, crops, and farm building silhouettes. Two-track dirt roads intersected with the narrow county highway that passed through the small town I found myself in. It included a two-pump gas station, one unleaded, one diesel, a small store that sold everything and where I bought a green and yellow t-shirt that said ‘kiss a corn grower today’, some sort of non-branded garage structure that appeared to service large trucks and farm machinery, like combines, tractors and chemical sprayers, a huge isolated pile of irrigation equipment that was slowly disappearing into some tall prairie grass, an oddly surviving blacksmith shop from a previous era that was still functioning — I could hear a sledgehammer banging iron and could see an orange glow with occasional sparks — and a prominently placed limp, American flag on a twenty-foot pole next to the store. Much of the ground surrounding these places was packed dirt, stained with oil, gasoline, and other industrial fluids. After refueling, I took one of the two-track roads out into a field with all my windows open. Driving slowly, I could smell the earth, plants, and humid air.
I stopped, got out and was surrounded by late summer corn that was way over my head. It was unsettling, a little like the anxiety I feel when I get lost in a maze and think I’ll never find my way out, or when I can’t locate the car immediately in a multilevel parking ramp because I forgot where I parked it and fear I might have to walk home. I imagined Iris Dement singing Our Town, or Leaning on the Everlasting Arm because the melancholy and anxiety were thick and starting to settle in my chest. It was oppressive. I thought about home and my family, but wasn’t anywhere near them, so I got back in and abruptly drove away from the discomfort and began thinking about the painting American Gothic.
My knowledge of Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic has been incorrect from the start. I never bothered to learn the full story behind the painting. My American Art history professor must have spoken about it, but I don’t remember what he said, and I’ve made huge assumptions about what I thought the painting depicted. I assumed Wood somehow discovered this married couple on their farm one day while out exploring and asked them if he could sketch them. They probably would’ve looked just like this when he asked them too. They agreed to pose for him, but he’d have to come back later. So, he showed up to sketch them at the specified time but had to wait awhile. He sat on the front porch until the two of them were finished with their afternoon bible study at the kitchen table. It was hot, humid, and quiet except for the cicadas and the mumbling he could hear through the screen door.
None of that happened though. It isn’t a portrait of a husband and wife at all, it depicts a father and daughter. Wood did come across this house randomly with a fellow artist and felt moved to draw it, and later asked his family dentist and his daughter to pose for him. They weren’t even in the same room when they posed for him, they were sketched separately. That’s how he constructed his painting. He wasn't documenting an existing situation; he assembled disparate elements and merged them to shape this open-ended story about fictional people in Iowa.
Regardless of Grant Woods real intent, or my uninformed assumptions, the painting makes me uncomfortable. Maybe it’s because the father is posing with a pitchfork which automatically implies poking, or sustained stabbing. It’s a creepy prop. Also, it makes me think of ‘children of the corn’ and these two look like they could be involved somehow, controlling them without words, just coded eye movements, sending out the ‘corn’ herds to track trespassers down if they accidentally stray into their fields. Someone might have pulled over, gotten out to stretch their legs and entered the rows of corn one hot afternoon during late summer, thinking they were far enough away from the farmhouse that they wouldn’t be noticed, but they miscalculated how easy it is to see movement in the distance on most Iowa farms. Then the children would be summoned, they’d congregate quickly and rush from the barn into the fields almost like a single organism, and quickly locate and isolate the intruders without even making their presence known, they’d stop abruptly like roadrunners, quietly encircle their prey, and emerge in slow motion, blinking simultaneously and silent.
Meanwhile in the American Gothic painting, What’s the daughter’s looking at outside the frame, and where’s the mother? Has she sadly passed away, or in the barn tending to the children
Songs :: Our Town and Leaning on the Everlasting Arm by Iris DeMent, and Revelator by Gillian Welch
© C. Davidson