Smith Center Coop. Pencil on Paper. 2014. 10"x15".

Like several of my more recent pieces, this drawing grew in large part out of an assignment that I created for the artists with whom I get to work in high school. In this case, I developed a lesson that incorporated linear perspective; technical skills working with drawing pencils, tortillons, and kneaded erasers; finding inspiration from the local environment; and copyright.

The lesson, which had many layers, led me to photograph scenes in our school's town while thinking specifically about linear perspective and about drawing in black and white. As I introduced the lesson, I emphasized copyright and encouraged the artists to take and use their own photographs for their work. I also encouraged them to find scenes within their local communities or around their farms – we live in a rural county – that would communicate some aspect of their lives to a wider audience.

To set the example, I walked around our school's town searching for scenes to capture with my camera. On one such jaunt, I looked down the railroad tracks which run east and west through town and which cut the town into two parts. The railroad tracks provided the perfect opportunity to discuss one-point perspective and how it can be visible in our everyday lives. The tracks also helped me to communicate the importance of the railroad to the town's past as well as its present. Those tracks were once used to carry settlers and visitors to and from the area; now they are used primarily to carry numerous grains and grasses from our area to markets near and far.

Looking east down the tracks, I could see a prominent feature of our town – the grain elevators of the local farmers' coop. The elevators can be more clearly connected than the tracks to the grains and grasses grown and harvested nearby. Those elevators also helped me to communicate the fact that this is a small town in a rural part of our country. Most everyone living in a rural community would recognize this scene, even if they could not personally give it significant meaning. Our town and our school survive because of agriculture, and the local coop elevators can be seen as a symbol of agriculture's significance in our area.

Even though I do not often get to create art alongside the high school artists, I decided that I would turn my photograph of our local coop alongside the railroad tracks into a drawing. I used the same drawing pencil, tortillon, and kneaded eraser that I had the high school artists use. Just as they challenged themselves to improve their observational, compositional, and technical skills with their drawings, I ended up challenging myself with this drawing. After about 12 hours of studying a 6.5"x10" printed image of my photograph and carefully recreating the details and values that I could see, I called it done.

In 2019, Smith Center Coop was used for the cover of the Summer 2019 issue of Plainsongs, a biannual collection of poetry published by Hastings College and printed in Hastings, Nebraska.

The drawing is now in the private collection of Patricia Oman and Eric Tucker.