Ascender Rises Above » In Search Of An American Gothic, Photo

In Search Of An American Gothic, Photo

Still Waiting For Spring. More Ascender’s Photos

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A shy man seeks perfection in his art:
Across vast acres, color and shape of tidiness,
Iowa’s unruly grass submits, blade by blade.
The blue of Mother’s dishes tints the sky.

Across vast acres, color and shape of tidiness,
sloping rows and rectangles piece a new land.
The blue of Mother’s dishes tints the sky.
Like a black quilt tied with loops of green,

sloping rows and rectangles piece the new land.
The reassuring fields of corn unfold
like black quilts tied with loops of green.
Under the artist’s alchemy,

the reassuring fields of corn unfold.
Sweet clouds hover like the hands of God.
Under the artist’s alchemy,
even winter’s leaden skies grow bright.

Sweet clouds hover like the hands of God
as the Thirties’ skylines and bread lines disappear.
Even winter’s leaden skies grow bright.
A yellow hill rises, like the belly of a woman ripe with child,

as the skylines and bread lines disappear.
Iowa’s unruly grass submits, blade by blade,
a yellow hill rises—
and the shy man finds perfection in his art.

For Grant Wood by Margaret Mackinnon

Still Life In A Green Chair by Roger Medearis; egg tempera on board.

Roger Medearis was an American Regionalist painter. He was a student of Thomas Hart Benton while at the Kansas City Art Institute in the late 1930s and took up the technique of egg tempera painting, a rediscovered medium popular with Regionalists.

Regionalism is the artistic focus was from artists who shunned city life, and rapidly developing technological advances, to create scenes of rural life. Regionalist style was at its height from 1930 to 1935, and is best-known through the so-called “Regionalist Triumvirate” of Grant Wood in Iowa, Thomas Hart Benton in Missouri, and John Steuart Curry in Kansas. During the Great Depression of the 1930s. Regionalist-type imagery appeared in magazine advertisements, and influenced American children’s book illustrators such as Holling Clancy Holling.

You remember Grant Wood’s oft-parodied American Gothic, right? It’s common knowledge that the models of the painting were Wood’s sister, Nan Wood Graham (1900-90), & his local dentist from Cedar Rapids, Dr. Byron H. McKeeby (1867-1950), interestingly, both sat separately and never in situ in front of the Carpenter Gothic style house (Sears, Roebuck & Co. used to sell them as kits) which still is standing in Eldon, Wapello County, Iowa.

Which, of course, set me off on Google to search for some American Gothic parodied paintings:

Warm Christmas American Gothic

Picnic American Gothi

Amazon Robot American Gothic

angelninas photography