Creation
In 1930, Grant Wood, an American painter with European training, noticed the Dibble House, a small white house built in the Carpenter Gothic architectural style in Eldon, Iowa. Wood decided to paint the house along with "the kind of people I fancied should live in that house." He recruited his sister Nan (1899–1990) to model the woman, dressing her in a colonial print apron mimicking 19th-century Americana. The man is modeled on Wood's dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby (1867–1950) from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The three-pronged hay fork is echoed in the stitching of the man's overalls, the Gothic window of the house and the structure of the man's face. Each element was painted separately; the models sat separately and never stood in front of the house.
Read more about this topic: American Gothic
Famous quotes containing the word creation:
“Like witches they flew along rows
Keeping creation at ease;
With a tendril for needle
They sewed up the air with a stem;”
—Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)
“Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“One of the necessary qualifications of an efficient business man in these days of industrial literature seems to be the ability to write, in clear and idiomatic English, a 1,000-word story on how efficient he is and how he got that way.... It seems that the entire business world were devoting its working hours to the creation of a school of introspective literature.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)