A Prairie Journal ™
Fall-Winter 2008
Illinois Cornfields
My high school lived on the edge of a cornfield in Williamsville, IL, just north of Springfield, where the smoke stacks of City Water Light and Power, visible from 25 miles away, poked out like toes from under a whispering green blanket of leaves. I wonder what pattern the fields made from above, what circles and squares of corn and woods composed that quilt, stretching from my small town to the capital. I took the fields for granted, found them boring as air, except when I rode my bike, or was a passenger in my mom’s Monte Carlo, watching the rows zip by, each one a study in one point perspective, receding back and back, fast, fast. My stomach would register each flying row with exhilaration, sight speeding into the mysterious bellies of fields.
In the early '90s, as an art student at Millikin University in Decatur, about 45 minutes from home, I was leafing through some black and white photographs. A year or two before, my high school art teacher had encouraged me to explore the cornfield behind the school with the yearbook club’s camera. I had never done anything with these photos so thought I’d use the images for studies in my college drawing class. Corn Study II is a simple pencil drawing. The other two are mixed media; I used charcoal, pencil and pastels, and discovered that rubber cement, brushed on and then brushed over with India ink, made the beautiful veined texture of corn leaves. Though these drawings were done almost 20 years ago, I’m still fond of them for teaching me how to slow down just enough to finally see the corn. They are available for purchase at Rachel Kellum Fine Art.
Copyright © 2008 Rachel Kellum. All rights reserved.