Variations on a Small Family Farm

Artist Statement Theme and Variations on the Driftless 10,000 years ago the Midwest states were covered in ice. The southwest corner of Wisconsin was an exception. As the glaciers retreated the land beneath was flattened. In what became known as the Driftless Region the absence of glaciers left rivers and streams to carve incisions into the bedrock creating hilltops and deep valleys. These photographs portray a connection to a farmland near the center of the Driftless. Four generations with my family, where grandparents milked dairy cows and raised five children. Photo albums carefully filled with small drugstore prints, my mother with her parents and four brothers assembled for the camera in their Sunday clothes, uncles in army uniforms, my father smiling at the wheel of his ancient orange tractor. This place I visited as the son of parents who moved away. The photographs amount to a record that could not have been made in another place. Interventions on the land of shape and color remind me of what happened here. Compositions of simple things, found or fashioned, were set amid the complications and repetitions nature presented. These actions on hilltop fields and valley woods were given immediate substance by what grew around them and were integrated with their surroundings as seasons dramatically changed. Robert Drea