Jolley: Five Minutes With V….Vaughan, Cow Country Artist
10/23/2009 10:03AM
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I was watching RFD TV last week. It was late at night and I was dozing on the couch, snoring as my wife so bluntly puts it. What woke me up was a feature on The Texas Country Reporter.
Bob Phillips was telling the story of an interesting artist, Virginia Vaughan, V….Vaughan as she prefers to be known. “V” was a woman who enjoyed life on a small family farm, part of rural America that’s disappearing.
She lived with her family on what was once the Gault Dairy Farm near Austin, Texas. Once a large operation far from the city, it had shrunk as David Gault, the patriarch who built it up, grew older and could no longer keep up the pace and the suburbs inexorably encroached.
With the growing Austin population practically knocking on their barn door, it soon became apparent that the days of living on the farm were numbered. The number was 365 – the number of paintings that Ms. Vaughan painted during their last year on the property.
Every day, she trekked outside to some place on the farm and put oil on canvas to capture the end of an era and a long, multi-generational family tradition. She artfully captured those last days for the extended Gault family and maybe for thousands of other families faced with a similar choices.
With so much attention paid to the science of farming, I was fascinated to learn more about the art of farming. A few minutes with V….Vaughan and the end of a once great family farm is time well spent.
Q. It was only a few short years ago that you realized the family farm would be no more. Tell me about the farm and how long it had been part of the family.
A. Our place was a dairy farm at first. Gault Dairy Farm was known all over this part of Texas, in the Austin area. It took their lifetime, but David and Ila Mae Gault, my husband’s grandparents nurtured a small herd and a few acres into a robust herd of 1600 cows.
Their land and leases were about 1600 acres in this "dairy period". For over 35 years Pa milked all these cows every 12 hours, every day, with NO VACATIONS!
For his last 20 years of farming, he grew hay and tended a small herd of mixed hereford and angus...eventually all angus. He trimmed back to a couple hundred acres, and that's where I spent my "farm life".
Q. You spent most of your life – 30 years - on the farm. How did you find your way there?
A. I met my husband when we were teenagers. I was just 16 and might have fallen in love with the farm as much as I fell for HIM! On our second date he gave me a night tour of the farm. He took me to the farthest reaches in a little vehicle that he sunk up to the axels in mud, and we had to walk back with coyotes howling everywhere...It freaked me out, but I LOVED IT!!!
Q. Why did the Vaughan family farm have to come to an end?
A. A few years after I joined the family, Pa got out of the dairy business, but kept busy tending a few dozen cows and this beautiful land till he died. His daughter, my husband’s Aunt Nancy kept the farm going until the sprawl of Austin surrounded us, making it difficult to move the cows and equipment. Selling the land was the best thing for the family to do. So at the end of 2007, we all left the farm.
While a teenager, my husband drove tractors, mended fences and picked up the heavy hay bales from the fields. The work was hard enough that full-time farming was not his goal in life. This, I think, and the inability to farm without lots of government "help" is a national trend, and our little farms are disappearing.
Q. Let's talk about the Vaughan family. How did the realization that they would be moving on effect them?
A. Nana, the matriarch would still be there if she could. She is 97, now, and must have a little bit of constant care, so she is nearby in an assisted living home. Her daughter is my mother-in-law, and she and my father-in-law moved to be near their youngest son on a small bit of land near College Station. Aunt Nancy, who did
the farming, has moved her clan to their other property and farming near Lexington.
My family decided to move to Round Rock, TX for my youngest son to be in a good high school and play sports at a big school for a change. We like the community a lot, but are hoping to live on land again when he graduates....we are looking, looking!
Q. You're an artist and we can see its effect on you through your art. You spent the last year on the farm painting; one-a-day, every day. What drove you to do such a monumental task?
A. I figured I would live on that farm my whole life, and I made it my goal to UNDERSTAND how it all worked: the seasons changing, weather turning bad and good, wildlife coming and going and mingling with our "domestic" animals...So when we knew the land would be sold, I decided to try to paint the farm every chance
I could. I wanted to "get it out of my system"....but really, I just made it worse!
The result: 365 paintings of our “Last Year on the Farm”. Painting is story telling, and I wanted to share THANKSGIVING for so many great years of blessing...not many get to live that long in a beautiful place. I may never live on the land again, and I am grateful for the time I had...expressing it all took WAY MORE than these 365 small works on canvas.
Q. Put down your brush and paint some word pictures for me. Tell me about rural America.
A. Aunt Nancy occasionally reminded me that “This isn’t a romantic life!” but being an artist, I always see the beauty in how the farmland under the big skies changed constantly. And this beauty, when translated from my eye to canvas can give the impression of romance.
A moment frozen in time by an oil painting doesn’t properly convey the deep commitment to the land that the farmer and rancher has. It’s only a snapshot and only gives an incomplete view of a special way of life. To give the FULL view, would mean including the MANY hardships that go with living...and some of these are mentioned in my notes on back of the canvases I painted.
I saw how all this “nature” coexists with the caretakers of the land: farmers and ranchers and their “domestic” stock. The “law of the harvest”, sowing and reaping, that is the subject of word pictures all over scripture was lived out before my eyes.
Every painting and all the notes are on my web site: www.v-vaughan.com . Thank you for sharing my “Last Year on the Farm”. I hope you will contact me if you see anything worthy of comment.
"Last Year on the Farm" became an exhibit that toured a few museum venues in 2008. I visited with HUNDREDS of people going through the same things our family did. Small farms are passing away, and so is that way of life in America.
It is something that has captivated my attention, and I am working on NEW PAINTINGS to depict this. I have started my project in the America's heartland. I am creating new works for a show which will be ready at the end of 2011. It is called Passing America: The Great Plains . It's another story for another time, and I am painting in a unique way that no one has done before. I would love to hear from anyone who wants to know more about it.
Chuck
Jolley is a free lance writer, based in Kansas City, who covers a wide
range of ag industry topics for Cattlenetwork.com and Agnetwork.com.