ATLANTA, Ill. (AP) - Once upon a time, artist Charlie Rogucki was a sunbaked desert rat.
Specifically, an Arizona desert rat, where he lived for around 18 years.
“And where nothing grows,” he adds.
Six years ago, Rogucki moved to the greener pastures of McLean County, where, conversely, everything grows.
Including his own family, comprised of wife Ashley and three sprouting kids, Eli, 8; Sophie, 6; and Will, 3.
The Bloomington-based Rogucki eventually crossed paths with a pair of kindred spirits, Hans and Katie Bishop, who’d recently embarked on their new career as organic farmers at the PrairiErth Farm founded by Hans’ father, deep in Route 66 country south of Atlanta.
Artist and farmers were brought into alignment via “my beekeeper, Thomas the Honey Pimp,” notes Katie, adding that “beekeepers know everybody.”
Rogucki, who signs his paintings Charlie R (“nobody can pronounce my last name correctly”), discovered a mutual interest in all things natural and became more than intrigued by what was happening 24/7 on the Bishops’ 10-acre spread.
“Their being vegetable farmers really piqued my interest, and I loved all the different things that went into it, and being surrounded with their culture.”
It was something he wanted to participate in, and introduce to his own family, he says.
During a first visit, he saw three large objects resting in front of a weathered barn.
The objects: Recycled Danish shipping containers - two 40 feet long by 9 feet tall, one about half that long; all, says Rogucki, “rusted and really ugly.”
In their previous adventures, the insulated and refrigerated containers traveled on barges around the world, says Katie. “We can’t trace exactly where they’ve been, but they’ve crossed oceans.”
The water-tight containers are used for storing the produce the farm regularly takes to farmers markets, and supplies to area grocery stores and restaurants (100 varieties of vegetables, from radishes to beets to Asian greens to Japanese pumpkins).
“They allow us to be in business all winter,” says Bishop of the easily climate-controlled containers.
Rogucki saw “a super-cool opportunity,” just begging to serve as the out-sized canvas for his often out-sized paintings (he’s done large murals indoors, but never one exposed to the elements; and he’s no stranger to recycling discarded objects and materials into painting surfaces … “anything, in fact, with a flat surface”).
“My impression of it was of an awesome giant canvas visible to the road,” he says, referring to 2000th Boulevard, a rustic byway that begins as Race Street, south off Old U.S. 66 in Atlanta, then turns into 2000th by the time the Bishops’ farm is reached a couple miles later.
Rusty/ugly or no, Charlie R began percolating with ideas about how to transform the side of the container facing the road into a mural that evoked and spoke to the spirit of the land surrounding it, and those who worked it.
He proposed an array of concepts to the Bishops, including one involving a “kind of vegetable kaleidoscope,” which proved a bit too busy for motorists rounding the curve to the farm.
“But I asked him to keep the turquoise, which I loved,” she says, pointing to the bold hue that wound up in the sky of the concept in progress: a strikingly configured panorama of a working “very bio-diverse” farm.
The time of day is sunset, with turquoise meeting the fiery waning rays as a farmer of indeterminate gender in the foreground surveys the soil below, surrounded by cattle, hay bales and baskets that were still being filled with produce at the time of this interview (Rogucki’s target date for completion was this weekend).
The artist’s brush, which he calls “aggressively fast,” has conjured bold impressionist “colors in all the wrong places,” along with the workaday sweep of a Works Progress Administration mural of the ’30s.
Though not designed to blend literally into the existing rural landscape, he notes, the painted vista is intended to co-exist with it in a kind of perfect karmic order.
Both Rogucki and the Bishops are hoping this introduction of an artist’s vision into the natural order will become a destination for people, as well as a sudden sensory surprise for those who happen upon it unexpectedly.
“I kind of hope that peoples’ first impression is just ’wow, that is very cool,’ which will make them want to stop and pull over for a closer look,” Rogucki muses.
“It’s a fusion of art and agriculture in the spirit of the community and reusing resources,” adds Katie. “Charlie’s vision is to make this into a local landmark, speaking to both Central Illinois’ creative culture and our agriculture.”
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Source: The (Bloomington) Pantagraph, https://bit.ly/1OjQzVy
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Information from: The Pantagraph, https://www.pantagraph.com
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