Cloud Trails, John Roger Cox, 1944

Quote of the day: You can never make anything idiot proof, because they keep making smarter idiots.

It was a beautiful day today, but I missed it, because I had to work. Woe is me. Plus, the Cardinals lost last night and are now out of the playoffs, which is actually a bit of a relief, because even when they do win, they seldom do it the easy way. We don’t call them the Cardiac Cards for nothing. Maybe, I should adopt a more prosaic baseball team to root for? One that disappoints, but only in the most unsurprising, expected of ways. The trouble with this thought though, is that there are so many of them to choose from.

In Cloud Trails, the repetition of precisely painted wheat stalks suggests a limitless field under a brilliant sky. The brightly colored ads papering the barn testify to the activities and products available in the artist’s Midwestern hometown of Terra Haute, Indiana. However, these manmade elements in combination with the absence of human figures make this unassuming scene seem eerily abandoned. Cox’s unsettling American Scene landscapes from the 1940s like this one are his most powerful works.