Notes from your Artist

Creating a logo for A Year On The Field

For many artists, there is little opportunity to work with farming or crops. However as a traditional artist working in a historical trade of silhouettes portraiture, I love working with living history museums, living history farms, and open air museums and events. I’m surrounded by agriculture, crops, and time-tested methods of doing all types of work.

Lauren Muney cuts silhouettes in the traditional method: freehand with only scissors

When my friend, colleague, and client (and project manager) Claus Kropp in Germany asked me to design a logo for this Year On The Field project, I knew that the logo had to be special. I helped design the project name and project description, so I already deeply connected with the project’s scope and goals. I enjoy the ‘directness’ of old farming techniques and even working with animals, tools, and solutions. (Personal note: I garden with a sickle, even at home in a United States city!) So I seemed to be the appropriate artist to join history and farming into one logo:

Graphical interface of the program on which the logo was created

The logo connects to the cycle of seed-cultivation-harvest-processing, and also the diversity of many time periods, museums, modern farmers, educators and scientists, and locations of the Growers and Participants.

It’s exciting that “YO” (Year On The Field) ‘team’ is extremely close-knit despite being scattered across the world, through different climates, time zones, and even industries. To create the logo, I worked with Claus across our continents and cultures, in real-time, over the modern invention of text messages - honing details and wording, finding ways to project the circle of plant growth and the global vision of the project.

The logo result: an international collaboration across miles and kilometers, across cultures and languages. The design shows that seeds become first seedlings, cultivated by hand-tools if needed, and then growing into the shocks of grain to be ready for processing. Since raising grain is a virtuous circle, our logo stays a circle as the next seeds can be prepared from the original grains.

Year On The Field participants connect across time, across time-zones, across languages, across cultures - to hone our goal: appreciating the joy of growth.

Author: Lauren Muney