Composition Book: American Gothic by Grant Wood. 6 x 9 composition book with gloss finish cover. Book has 140 blank pages and is thin lined, wide ruled. Great for use as a journal, notebook, diary, field notes, travel logs, random thoughts and ideas, spiritual experiences, dates, appointments and more.

Describes Grant Wood's portrait of Iowa farmers, and documents how the piece has represented midwestern Puritanism, hard-working endurance, and the often-parodied American heartland.

He claimed to be “the plainest kind of fellow you can find. There isn’t a single thing I’ve done, or experienced,” said Grant Wood, “that’s been even the least bit exciting.” Wood was one of America’s most famous regionalist painters; to love his work was the equivalent of loving America itself. In his time, he was an “almost mythical figure,” recognized most supremely for his hard-boiled farm scene, American Gothic, a painting that has come to reflect the essence of America’s traditional values—a simple, decent, homespun tribute to our lost agrarian age. In this major new biography of America’s most acclaimed, and misunderstood, regionalist painter, Grant Wood is revealed to have been anything but plain, or simple . . . R. Tripp Evans reveals the true complexity of the man and the image Wood so carefully constructed of himself. Grant Wood called himself a farmer-painter but farming held little interest for him. He appeared to be a self-taught painter with his scenes of farmlands, farm workers, and folklore but he was classically trained, a sophisticated artist who had studied the Old Masters and Flemish art as well as impressionism. He lived a bohemian life and painted in Paris and Munich in the 1920s, fleeing what H. L. Mencken referred to as “the booboisie” of small-town America. We see Wood as an artist haunted and inspired by the images of childhood; by the complex relationship with his father (stern, pious, the “manliest of men”); with his sister and his beloved mother (Wood shared his studio and sleeping quarters with his mother until her death at seventy-seven; he was forty-four). We see Wood’s homosexuality and how his studied masculinity was a ruse that shaped his work. Here is Wood’s life and work explored more deeply and insightfully than ever before. Drawing on letters, the artist’s unfinished autobiography, his sister’s writings, and many never-before-seen documents, Evans’s book is a dimensional portrait of a deeply complicated artist who became a “National Symbol.” It is as well a portrait of the American art scene at a time when America’s Calvinistic spirit and provincialism saw Europe as decadent and artists were divided between red-blooded patriotic men and “hothouse aesthetes.” Thomas Hart Benton said of Grant Wood: “When this new America looks back for landmarks to help gauge its forward footsteps, it will find a monument standing up in the midst of the wreckage . . . This monument will be made out of Grant Wood’s works.”

The social and political climate in which Wood's art flourished bears certain striking similarities to America today, as national identity and the tension between urban and rural areas reemerge as polarizing issues in a country facing the consequences of globalization and the technological revolution. Wood portrayed the tension and alienation of contemporary experience. By fusing meticulously observed reality with fables of childhood, he crafted unsettling images of estrangement and apprehension that pictorially manifest the anxiety of modern life.

Richly illustrated, the book examines Wood's modernist tendencies, ranging from abstract design principles to the lasting influence of paintings by Georges Seurat and German Neue Schlichkeit artists. Also provides the most detailed account available of the artists working methods.

Examines "American Gothic" painter Grant Wood's period in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, describing his studio/residence and discussing his body of work, including not only his paintings, drawings, and prints but his work in wood, metal, and interior design.

This volume illuminates the life and work of American painter Grant Wood (1891-1942). He is best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest, particularly the painting American Gothic, an iconic image of the 20th century. The author provides insightful narrative and more than 60 color plates in this celebration of Grant Wood.