Like square clouds in a round sky

It's the first day of class and instructions are simple: look at the work of art on the screen, describe what you see in some detail, and then speculate about what it suggests about the relationship between people and nature. "There's no right answer," I tell my students; "I just want you to give me an idea of your writing and analytical skills," but when I read their responses, I am dismayed. Is there a farmer in the class? How about an artist? Not even one?

The class is Concepts of Nature and the painting is Grant Wood's Spring Turning, painted in 1936 (see it here). I've used this painting before so I'm accustomed to seeing students struggle to figure out what's going on: What are those brown squares on the hills? Baseball diamonds? An arena for horse-racing? Or just an attempt to impose symmetry on the face of nature?

They notice the grass, the intense green of the rolling hills, and I encourage them to walk up close and look at details, but maybe they're shy or maybe they're in a hurry to finish so they keep their seats and fail to notice so many small things: the tiny farmer and his team of horses tilling the ground, the road and farmhouse and fence-line tucked between the hills, and the phalanx of clouds rolling along the top of the painting.

Most of all I want them to notice the clouds. So much depends upon a white cloud rolling over a square field, and a few students pay lip service to the clouds, mostly to note that the clouds are white and fluffy. Not a single student notices that the clouds are also square.

Clouds are not supposed to be square! Why would Grant Wood have painted something so unnatural in a painting immersing the viewer in the natural world?

I'll ask that question on Monday when we look at the painting again, and I'll nudge students to notice the contrasting shapes: the hills are rounded and rolling, while the only straight lines and right angles are imposed by human beings, inviting us to associate roundness with nature and squares with culture. But then why the square clouds?

In fact the clouds perfectly mimic the shapes of the farmer's fields, providing a visual metaphor for the nineteenth-century belief that Rain Follows the Plow. Wood, painting in 1936, could look back at the Dust Bowl, the disastrous result of plowing without regard to the contours of the land, but he was clearly also looking back even further to the time in the late nineteenth century when farmers were enticed to settle in too-dry areas by the promise that cultivating parched land would change the weather--that plowing dry land would cause rain to fall on it.

Wood's painting mocks that concept by taking it literally, which ought to cause viewers to step back and question other assumptions. Yes, the peaceful setting evokes nostalgia for a pastoral lifestyle, and yes, the massiveness of nature dwarfs the tiny farmer with his tiny team, but step back and look at the painting as a whole and suddenly the whole landscape looks like a human body covered with a quilt of verdant green, perhaps a sexy pun on planting seeds or fertilization or perhaps a reminder that we see nature always through human eyes and shape it in our own image. 

None of my students saw that today, or if they did they lacked the confidence to write about it. If I accomplish nothing else in this class, I hope that by the end of the semester every one of my students will notice the little details that stand out like square clouds in a round sky, and I hope they will start asking questions and keep asking until they find some answers.