It's not unusual to paint or draw on a canvas, wood, paper or other similar materials, but artist Stan Herd is known for his 'earthworks'. That means he uses the Earth as his canvas and nature itself as his paint. To create his works, it takes weeks of mowing, digging and planting. Herd created his first earthwork in 1981 and has completed around 35 more over the proceeding years. One of his latest projects was a recreation of Van Gogh's famous 'Olive Trees' painting. Just a little bit larger than the original, Herd's piece covered 1.2 acres of the Thomson Reuters campus in Minnesota. He was sponsored by the Minneapolis Institute of Art to create this earthwork, which took around six months to complete. It's large enough that it can even be seen from the air near the Minneapolis airport! Talking about this piece, Herd said…
“It’s an iteration of Van Gogh’s painting writ large in native plants and materials. It never looks like I want it to… I bit off a lot here, to try to pull this off. A few of the plants were eaten by deer, and a few were blown over. But that’s the dance of nature.”
Website: Stan Herd
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