Ingrained Care: Evolution of a Painting

Ingrained Care, acrylic on wood, 16” x 20”, 2022.

I made a short video about the creation of Ingrained Care, a painting inspired a conversation I had in 2019 with Drick Rodgers and Julia Rodgers Clark in Rolling Fork, Mississippi.

The community story that inspired Ingrained Care….

Drick Rodgers comes from a long line of farmers.

In 1920, his maternal grandfather moved to the area to serve in the first class of county extension agents after cooperative extension began. He bought 200 acres in Sharkey County shortly before the Depression, during which he had a dairy, and his wife, Drick’s grandmother, took in sewing to help make ends meet.

Both of Drick’s parents were farmers.

His mother took over the farm after his father’s death, and I have no quantitative data to support this statement other than my gut, which I would bet was unusual for a woman to do during that time in the Mississippi Delta.

Vivian Rodgers quickly began implementing conservation practices to address erosion, later served for a spell as the Soil & Water District Commissioner, and she was later awarded “Outstanding Farm Woman” by Staplcotn, the oldest cotton marketing cooperative in the nation.

I’d like to pause here for a sec to let this all sink in. A woman took over a family farm in the Deep South in the 1970’s and made the farm more sustainable, which was assuredly not convenient and not fashionable at the time.

When I visited the Rodgers in 2019, Sharkey County was recovering from months-long flooding of the Mississippi River. 550,000 acres in the Delta - literally half the land in the county - were underwater, due in large part to a lack of pumps, as Mississippi’s the only state along the lower Mississippi River with no pumps to address interior flooding.

This is all a little fuzzy, but best I can understand is that in 2008, the EPA blocked the construction of a pumping station that the Army Corps of Engineers had recommended, which the Mississippi Levee Board claims would have decreased the amount of flooding in the Mississippi Delta by at least one-third.

Many farmers, like the Rodgers, are doing their part to farm responsibly and sustainably: practicing reduced-till farming, planting grass strips along creeks that run through their property, maintaining grass ditches and waterways to catch silt and runoff, and relying on Phaucet, a Mississippi State University computer program, to conserve water.

I feel like every person born in the 70’s and 80’s has a weird obsession with stop-motion animation. I’m honored to contribute to this genre, ha.

Thanks for watching.

If you’re located in central Iowa, you can check out Ingrained Care and four other paintings at the 2024 Annual Landscape Exhibition at Olson-Larsen Galleries in West Des Moines, May 31 - July 20.

P.S. Enjoy poring over the creative process? Check out how more of my paintings come to life.