Rustic Rush

Farm & Home Week came again for the University of Wisconsin's College of Agriculture and for thousands of farmers who freewheeled into Madison. This year Art was the big news, because last year Sociologist John Barton and Painter John Steuart Curry had started something when they put on show some 60 paintings, wood carvings and whittled knickknacks created by Wisconsin farmers and their wives. This year, even after the show had opened, rustic painters from the backwoods continued to arrive, toting rolls of canvas and bits of wood. One of them, Walter Thorpe of Baraboo, Wis., shyly unrolled two laboriously drawn pictures entitled Rattlesnake and Covey of Quail. Painter Curry was Impressed, hung them both immediately.

One of the farmer-artists, Earl Sugden, 56, of Yuba in Richland County, does his landscapes with barn paint, makes his own brushes out of hair from his horses' tails clamped into holders fashioned from old tin cans. Painting is only one of Farmer Sugden's many hobbies.' Self-taught in everything, he makes arrowheads by pressure-chipping, has made tin models of more than 135 different kinds of Wisconsin birds, likes to make jackknives, translates poetry from French, German, Norwegian and Hebrew, writes poetry himself. Besides a workmanlike landscape and a portrait of a worried raccoon, Farmer Sugden sent in six bottle paintings, which he made by patiently poking bits of colored sand into place in old whiskey bottles with the aid of a hatpin. Experts pronounced Sugden's sand paintings equal to the best of their kind produced by the Hopi Indians of the southwest U. S. Farmer Sugden was not at the show. A man of rural tastes, he farms the land he was brought up on, expects to die on it, has not visited Madison, or any other city, in 20 years.

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