BY THE SWEAT OF THY BROW

On a hot July afternoon while driving down 6th Street in Kingsville, I saw this man wrestling the tire off of a John Deere tractor. This was the catalyst for an expression that was now emerging strongly from the agriculture and climate of South Texas: the land of the big fields, big tractors and big heat. The Biblical concept of agriculture, the cultivation of wilderness for the production of food and fiber as a sanctified covenant between God and man was becoming very strong in my art. The irony was that this man struggled to change the tire on the great machine that was to ease his labor in the field. This scene impressed itself on me. Since the expulsion from Eden, little had essentially changed. For all mans’ cleverness of invention, he yet eats his bread by the sweat of his brow.

There was a period in twentieth century modernist art called “Futurism.” It glorified the machine as a great liberator. Its mechanical workings were the symbol of reason’s triumph of invention and scientific method. Machines were the liberator of man from superstition, irrational behavior, hard labor, and religious fanaticism. Then there were those who viewed the machine as something to be feared, as the destroyer of all that is poetic, natural, and handmade and beautiful. Though all these ideas still exist, it is interesting that none of these ideological concepts took a strong hold on the American mind. We have always been a people open to invention and at peace with our machines. Far from standing in awe of them or fearing them; we adore them and love tinkering with them. They are part of our being but never considered gods. In this painting of a man changing his tractor’s tires, the man’s posture and the steel tire iron he holds could easily be the means of trying to lift a mule stuck butt deep in mud in another time. In either case, it’s a matter of getting the thing to move.