Rustic Prints 3

With this rustic print, we delve deeply into Halloween—or I think we do. The orange sunset and the ghoulish shadows give an immediate impression of the ghostly season. The shocks of corn lean to the right as if they might be capable of motion; if so, they are marching forward to cross the stream and to haunt the two lonely farmhouses in the valley.

Framed Print of Shocks of Corn in a Scene Reminiscent of Halloween

I am not old enough to remember corn planted in checked rows so that a field could be cultivated at right angles without uprooting the young stalks, but I do recall cornstalks that were farther apart in the row and rows that were relatively far apart. When I was young, the corn stood in the field later in the season before it was harvested, and it was not arranged in shocks. I have a distinct recollection of coming home from college for Thanksgiving and finding my father still picking corn. From my vantage point in time, the shocks in this rural print date back a long way. The corn appears to have been planted amid the trees of the hill. I am thinking that the location of the shocks provides evidence of a crop that demanded a great deal of hands-on labor. No big tractor danced around those trees to plant the corn in such a narrow field along a hill above a creek! Accordingly, the scene takes us back a few generations.

The faux wood grain of the paper matting contrasts oddly with the real wood grain of the frame, but the generation when the art was produced may have had an aesthetic that permitted appreciation of the faux and the real side-by-side. To my eye, the dark mat lends mystery to the illustration.

As in the previous print in this series of blogs, the trees have retained their leaves: a fact suggesting that they are oaks. Hints of low-lying fog imply the possibility of frost in the morning to come.

Unlike the previous two prints in these blogs, no congenial smoke curls from a chimney. The artist has avoided any indication of conviviality or familial warmth.

From the oaks, through the marching skeletons of corn, to the dismal gray clouds approaching in the last light of the setting sun, the illustration expresses the Celtic Samhain transplanted in American soil. Am I reading too much into the art, or did the artist deliberately provide for such impressions?