Irregular geometric shapes fit together with compositional grace. A sturdy grey line cuts the plane with a gentle bend. Furrows are scratched into the shapes like delicate etchings, in warm and harmonious colors. If not for the tiny truck to provide context and scale, I might imagine that I’m looking at a well-formed painting. 

Jamey Stillings was on an aerial assignment for a company, and the heliport was about 40 minutes from the site. Dealing with fog and difficult weather, they flew back and forth over the farmland, and Stillings was beguiled — by the new barely green, just starting to turn, still fallow, just plowed fields. And really, just to indulge in the act of seeing, he made this small series, the Fields of Belgium.

From all of Stillings’ admirable projects, a powerful collection that charts Renewable Energy and the Shifting Human Landscape in so many ways around the world, why am I so drawn to this little intersection of plowed fields? I’m not up on the precise farming practices in Belgium, but it seems to me that this is an ecologically responsible instance of people taking energy from the earth. The series fits into the broader survey of the harvesting of power, but here the energy follows a different line from field to food to sustaining the body. 

Stillings works with an optimism that humans can still relate to the land with care, obtaining power from sun, wind, hydro, and geothermal resources. Perhaps it’s the weight of technology in his oeuvre accounts for my attraction to the poetic lightness of the spring dirt in the Fields of Belgium. I love these fields for their painterly composition and obvious goodness. The picture reads to me like a letter of affection to the land, from someone who well understands its vulnerabilities, with a nod to the Belgian farmers as accidental expressionist artists.



-Lisa Woodward

See more of Jamey’s remarkable view of the earth here