Dan Brinkmeier

Dan Brinkmeier is a farmer who lives in Mount Carroll, Illinois, and he also is a visual artist.

 I have always been a representational artist, and from an early age I drew images in order to tell stories, perhaps using narrative as a way to escape the real world and enable myself to live in a world of my own making. Today, I consider my artwork to have a didactic role similar to that of educational materials or religious images in the past, such as you would use in a church or school to teach a lesson. I grew up in rural Northwestern Illinois, and for me, fatalism is always present in our culture. As a young artist, I began to connect this fatalism with the Midwestern landscape itself, and how difficult it is for us to maintain control over much of anything— creeks rise and take out your fences, cows die for seemingly no reason at all, corn withers up during a drought, wet hay will burn your barn down to the ground. Perhaps calling an angel, or making a small “payment” during a small ritual ceremony in a farm field, will provide some relief. Rural people, such as myself, sometimes develop a close, almost physical relationship with the spirit world. That is the World that I try to depict in my artwork.

Illinois