Long Time Passing
A visual chronicle of farm life in the Midwest, past and present
Paintings by Roberta Condon and Lorraine Ortner-Blake
I hope you will be able to visit this traveling exhibit as it tours the Midwest in 2021 and 2022 Here are some of the venues:
April 18 through August 1, 2021
Rahr West
610 N. 8th Street Manitowoc WI 54220
October 12 through November 20, 2021
Kavenaugh Gallery, Fine Line Creative Arts Center
37W570 Bolcum Road, St. Charles, IL 60175
January 10 through March 4, 2022
New Visions Gallery
Marshfield Clinic, Marshfield WI 54449
Together, Roberta Condon and I
tell the story of the Midwest farm, past and present through paintings. Roberta’s 26 pastel paintings, titled “American Pastoral,”
present the incredible beauty of our farming landscape. They also reflect the
changes in our rural culture as agriculture shifts away from small acreage
family farms. I'll link to her paintings when they are posted.
My paintings look back at family farming through the eyes
of my mother, as well as my childhood on a dairy farm. The paintings are small, about 10 inches square, done in gouache. They illustrate our lives
on Midwest farms of the 1930s through ‘70s.
Here are some of the 28 paintings:
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Making rugs from rags
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| Picking peas |
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Grandma in the garden
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Music lesson
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The last load of hay
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Doing calligraphy for the church
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First day at public school
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Walnuts in winter
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Chicken plucking
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We had a big cucumber patch that year
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Winter hill
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I've gathered these and more paintings together in a book called "We Always Had
Chickens."
This book is a window into a time of small farms and big families,
told by word, photograph, and painting. There are twenty-eight full-page
paintings illustrating life on a 20th-century Midwest farm.
Memory is
notoriously unreliable, so to back up these primitive, sometimes
whimsical paintings, are stories from many of the players in those
adventures, plus nearly 100 photographs of a lifetime of farming.
