Apparently, October 12th is National Farmers Day, as well as still being Columbus Day. Up until this morning, I had never heard of this, but y’all can be assured it is now officially on my calendar! Ever since I was a small girl, I wanted to be a farmer. In addition to my attempts at gardening and mad tree-planting sprees, I also raise (working) dairy goats, rabbits, and chickens. What better way to celebrate my new favorite holiday than with farm-themed art?
Hayfield Art
So far, I’ve done two paintings featuring hayfields: my Sunset Over the Hayfield in oil pastel, and the watercolor sketch Make Hay While the Sun Shines. Since I live at the dead end of a dirt road in a very rural corner of a rural county, hayfields are a common sight whenever we drive anywhere. There is just something about a field full of hay bales that gives me a warm and happy feeling in the depths of my soul. Round or square, though round are definitely the locally preferred format, I love to see hay bales sitting in a sunny field.
Produce artwork (fruits and vegetables)
While our property came with two mature Asian pear trees, we’ve added to that list a LOT in the decade since moving in: lemons, limes, oranges, sweet kumquat, dwarf pomegranate, an olive tree, and this year added two grapefruit and two fig trees. I still want to plant a couple of Barbados cherry trees, some true date palms, Indian/silver date palms, and pindo (jelly) palm trees. My husband also started growing moringa trees from seed this summer. Even more interesting, we discovered someone at some point in time planted a pink dwarf banana tree in the back of our property – I looked it up and those are native to Asia. The wildlife got our bright pink bananas this year, but now we know it’s back there, so perhaps next year we’ll get to eat some.
All that preamble to explain why fruits and vegetables are high on my list of favorite things to draw and paint when I want to do up a traditional still life piece of art. I’ve even gone to the grocery for the sole purpose of getting picturesque produce to do a photo shoot the other year. (For the record, only half of those photos were in focus, which is why I am not a photographer.)
I intended to post all of the produce-themed still life drawings and paintings here … but that is quite a lot of artwork! Instead, I’ll direct you to the category page – click here for the fruit and veggie still life. Even if I can’t grow it this far south, I can still buy and paint it.
Livestock Artwork
This category I do more than I draw or paint. Y’all have been treated to photos and stories about my goats, but I’ve only shared one drawing of one goat so far. It’s on my list of subjects to feature more, along with the chickens and rabbits. I’ll be doing more of that over the dark season, because we browsed the selection of farm animal T-shirts on Amazon and I was NOT impressed with what is out there. The obvious solution to my creative mind is to make my own! I do have my produce-themed art on apparel over at my RedBubble shop. Stay tuned, because I’ll probably do a rabbit first.
Celebrating National Farmers Day with art
I’ll need to wrap this up, because the charcoal pencils are calling to me to get to today’s drawing session. If I had known prior to this morning, I could have had something to paint, but right now I am quite content with just posting here to the art blog for this year’s short-notice celebration.
Next year, though, I will be pulling out the stops! Happy National Farmers Day to everyone, and have an art-full day.
