Crop artist conveys message through earthworks

The Earth is Stan Herd’s pallet.

Herd is a crop artist who uses milo, soybeans, corn and wheat to paint images that are not only aesthetically pleasing but relate to the importance of his home prairie and connection to a greater global community.

Herd gave a lecture Tuesday at the Dyck Arboretum in Hesston as a part of its winter lecture series.

His works have varied in size from a mammoth 216 acres to smaller pieces in the range of one-quarter acre.

He draws out his creations on grid paper and then lays out the field in giant grid.

One-quarter of an inch on paper might equal 20 feet in the field.

Herd burns, plows and discs and uses crops and landscape material to carve out his creations.

Herd, 59, grew up in Protection, Kan., where his parents run a cow/calf operation. He attended Wichita State University. He returned to Protection when he was 20 and fed cattle for a year before continuing to pursue his passion for art.

“I came home when I was 20 years old, and I met my parents, and for the first time, I appreciated my father and mother’s profession and its independence,” he said.

Herd often has taken inspiration from other artists. He used pieces like those by Christo, who you might remember for his worldwide umbrella project, to shape his concept of his own art.

When Herd first started producing pieces, he intended them to be temporary works of art. Many of his pieces have gone back into commercial crop production or been reclaimed by the natural processes of nature.

“Early on, my intention was to respect the landscape,” he said. “My thought on that has always been that a mountain should look like a mountain and not a mountain that looks like an Indian.”

But Herd has done some permanent pieces, such as a portrait of Amelia Earhart near her childhood home of Atchinson.

Herd may be most well known for some of his commercial pieces, including a bottle of Absolut vodka, an ad for Neiman Marcus or piece promoting Garth Brooks’ album, “Fresh Horses.”

It has not all been about commercial success.

Herd spent nine months working in New York City to create a crop art piece in Manhattan. He worked on land owned by Donald Trump but received no funding from the mogul for the crop art installation.

The New Yorkers did not exactly know what to think of Herd and his project, he said.

“The construction workers from Brooklyn and Yonkers just looked at me, calling me farmer,” he said.

He worked with local homeless men to plant and groom the vegetables and other plants that made up the rural landscape scene in the midst of the asphalt jungle.

“Some mornings I would be in the skyscrapers with the Trump executives, and then in the evening I would be along the Hudson drinking port with my homeless friends,” he said.

The story of his time in New York recently was made into a movie “Earthworks.”

Other Herd pieces also have attempted to cross cultural barriers.

Herd did a piece in Cuba called Rosa Blanca.

He said he got letters from Pat Roberts, head of the Congressional security commission, and Cuban leader Fidel Castro on the piece.

“It was a people-to-people exchange,” he said. “We tried to keep the government out of it.”

After the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy by U.S forces during the war in Yugoslavia, Herd carved a Chinese harmony symbol out of plot of land using a weed eater.

Not all Herd’s work has been in crop art. He also does oil paintings and murals. He spent time working with journalist Bill Curtis as an artist in residence in Sedan.

He created an installation called Prairiehenge.

It consists of two intersecting circles of limestone.

The smaller circle is symbolic of the Osage Indian nation, who lived on the land first. The larger circle is symbolic of all the people who came after, such as the pioneers.

Herd said Curtis and he conceived and built the installation as a monument to the prairie.

Not many people see Prairiehenge because it is on a remote area of the prairie, put there by design. He said the area is some of the most incredibly beautiful terrain he has experienced on the prairie, and the art piece is about the journey to site more than the rocks and land itself.

“It is not the creation of the work, it is the people you meet that change your life and that you change theirs,” he said.

Herd said it is hard to make a living as an artist in Kansas. He said he considered leaving the state, but the prairie and its people kept him here.

“So many artist and writers from New York and Los Angeles are moving back to Kansas and hanging out in Kansas.,” he said. “It is incredible. We all have the tallgrass prairie informing us.

“I fill so incredibly fulfilled,” he said. “I get so much support here, it is incredible. We’re in the right place.”