Earth Song, Robert Berkeley Green

Exhibition Label:
"Claimed: Land Use in Western America," Jun-2007, Kate Meyer
“Contour plowing and terracing, two important tillage techniques developed during the Dust Bowl thirties, reshaped the cultivated landscape into still another kind of complexity. Plowed furrows, many farmers began to see, must follow the shape of the land, not some abstract scheme sketched in a land office.”

Donald Worster, “A Tapestry of Change: Nature and Culture on the Prairie,” in The Inhabited Prairie, 1998

Archive Label:
“This is the fourth of the landscape watercolors. It shows that time when the snow and ice on the fields create those light stripes against the dark earth where the snow has melted. Then there’s a little strip of the dry grass that runs in the foreground and background. I don’t remember where this was. I remember doing a picture sitting up on top of a hill in the summertime and as I started to paint the field this guy got out in the field and started to mow it. By the time I had finished the painting he was up and mowing it beside me and he’d done the whole field.”