Sunflower Still Life Earthwork | Stan Herd

Sunflower Still Life Earthwork "Early on the mandate was visual and the canvas and the medium were the imperative. 'Sunflower Still Life' was a minimalist attempt at controlling the elements. Van Gogh's varied Sunflower paintings informed the piece, but the earthwork image was more related to the quilts of my immediate history and a recognition of the graphic nature of the landscape defined by the utility of generations of my family's agriculture history. Aesthetics were important to my father and his father when it came to farming. I didn't recognize this until my late twenties. Human consciousness thrives on beauty and diminishes in its void. Outside of those who work the land, photographers began to reveal subtleties in earthworks created. It was through the insights of others that I began to understand the lessons of collaboration and synergy in art and life. I had also distanced myself from the rural people that I came to regard as provincial in the ten years after the university