Grant Wood's story

Grant Wood 1891- 1942,
An American painter born and bred on a farm in Iowa.

By painting simple scenes of the land and people he knew best, he helped create an important, all-American style of art. Grant wood's painting's show the love he had for the people and customs of the Midwestern United States. He soon realised that scenes of these people and places he knew were as beautiful and important as anything he had seen in Europe and they soon became his subject matters for his art works.

In the painting 'Woman with plants', he painted his mother as a strong and loving, border line woman. He placed her in a farm landscape and paid special attention to the decorative stitching on her dress, the cameo around her neck, the potted plant and othe details that were important to her.

It was one of the first paintings about the Midwest that seemed like it was done by someone who actually really knew and understood the people there.
Grant Wood kept working in his new style and soon painted his most famous piece, 'American Gothic', featuring the family dentsist and his sister, Nan, as the farmer and his daughter.

Soon Grant wood's paintings started to become very popular. Many people felt that his art was easier to understand than a lot of the new modern art being done and they came along during a rough time, The Great Depression.
The depression caused many people to lose their jobs and savings. It made people feel better to look at Grant wood's paintings of farmlands and proud, hardworking families who helped to make America great. Grant wood also painted pictures of famous American legends. In 'Midnight ride of Paul Revere' he showed the story as he imagined it as a child. He painted broccoli-shaped trees and toy-like houses. The roads go off into the background and seem to glow in the dark. He gave his painting an almost fairytale look. Paul Revere's horse even looks more like a wooden rocking horse than a real horse.

Regionalism to Grant Wood was a simple concept: artists should paint what is around them, what they know and what they see. He took great inspiration from the Flemish masters, noting their skill inpainting local scenes while capturing the universal significance of the subject matter. An 'American way of looking at things' might as well be seeing an idealized and usable past in a difficult and uncertain present, as Grant Wood did in many of his landscapes.

Perhaps it is true Grant Wood's ideas about regionalist art, which sprang from the belief that an artists should 'paint out of the land and the people they know best' materialized that quickly.as dring the 1930's, the lack of sohisticated form or style were the main criticisms of Grant Wood's regionalist work; after the second world war, his art was criticized equally for its subject matter.

Grant Wood's most famous statement,

'I found the answer about what I knew when I joined a school of painters in Paris after the war who called themselves 'neo-meditationists'. They believed an artist had to wait for inspiration, very quietly. It was then that I realized that all the really good ideas I'd ever had came to me while I was milking a cow. So I went back to Iowa'.

This is the same quote as what had been written on my postcard and it was initially said to reassure the people of Iowa during the great depression. It's almost as though he's telling his people that you can get something big and something to be proud of out of the smallest objects or moments in time.
Although this may rightfully have been the process of Grant Wood's thinking, the statement itself speaks publicly for he repeated this often to reportes from around the country which said to people that inspiration is within the smallest object, anyone can 'milk' it, it gave hope. Grant Wood described himself and his movement, essentially, as the American dream led by the American dreamer at a time when popular sentiment was looking hard for a positive national note.

This quote was so inspirational to the people of America that they had cards with it on as well as bracelets and jewellery with it printed into it so that no-one can forget the hope it gave to people.