Creating Art to Save and Honor the Farm

When Nebraska farmer and rancher Vern Friesen’s livelihood was jeopardized by an uncertain agricultural market in the mid-1990s, he turned to his creative instincts to save the family farm. He picked up a paintbrush and sculptor’s tools and began looking at rural life from a new angle.

“My main goal is to hold on to the land,” says Friesen, of Henderson, Neb., (pop. 982). “I grew up on this farm, and it’s in my blood as much as my artwork is.”

The 480-acre farm two miles outside of town has always been Friesen’s home. His parents started farming 240 acres of the land in 1947, the year he was born. He and his eight brothers and sisters grew up doing chores on the farm—milking cows, gathering chicken eggs, baling hay, and weeding soybean fields.

Over the years, Friesen doubled the farm’s acreage. Now he leases 160 acres to a neighbor and manages 320 acres himself, raising corn, soybeans, and a small herd of beef cattle.

Friesen, 53, and wife, Clarise, were content with the modest living the farm provided them and their three children, who are now 18 to 27. But plunging grain prices a few years ago threatened their livelihood—so that’s when Friesen, who studied art at Chadron State College in northwest Nebraska in the 1970s, turned to his lifelong love of art to supplement his income, maintain the family farm, and preserve his lifestyle.

He began painting. He cast bronze sculptures he had designed years earlier, and in 1998 he opened Friesen’s Gallery in downtown Henderson. Sandwiched between a bank and car wash on Main Street, the small gallery showcases his work and that of other area artists.

As one steps through the doorway, the world of the farmer and rancher comes to life on canvas and in bronze. Friesen paints and sculpts what he knows—rural America.

His first bronze sculpture, titled Roper, was inspired by the 20 years he spent roping calves and steers in rodeos across the Midwest. “My work has to have life in it; I have very few landscapes,” Friesen says. “There’s always a horse or a cow, or a rancher or a cowboy.”

His decision to pursue his art not only solved his own dilemma but is benefiting his hometown, too. Friesen is donating the proceeds of Sodbuster, a bronze sculpture of a man and his plow horse, to help build a living history museum honoring the town’s Mennonite founders. Henderson Heritage and Tourism Inc. receives $350 for each sculpture sold.

Friesen also is painting images of the town’s original buildings to raise money for the museum. Reproductions of the paintings are affixed to wood cutouts and sold as miniature replicas of the buildings. Nearly 100 already have been sold.

“Not all little towns have someone with the talents of Vern,” says LaVonne Thiessen, a member of the town’s tourism board. “He has a lot of knowledge of our community and its values.”

Friesen’s artwork is known beyond Nebraska. In 1999, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association commissioned Friesen to design a bronze sculpture. Last year, 15 reproductions of the sculpture, depicting a rancher and his grandchildren, were given to ranchers across the United States who received the organization’s Environmental Stewardship Award.

Friesen says he will continue to fit his artwork around field preparation, planting, cultivating, irrigating, harvesting, springtime calving, and occasional roping of a sick calf—because that’s where he gets his inspiration.

Cindy Murphy McMahon is a freelance writer in Omaha, Neb.

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