Joan Herbert Preserves Scenes Of Farm And Ranch Life Through Art

One gopher is sitting with one paw in the air, ready to run for shelter at any moment; the one behind is standing and looking into the distance. Two fine representations of the quintessential rodent of the plains have been realistically painted on steel cut to fit their profile to perfection — Joan Herbert paints even the stakes of this inventive lawn ornament, lovingly.

“My husband has a feed box manufacturing business and does a lot of welding,” Herbert says. “I take the scrap metal and recycle it by cutting it again into various shapes and figures with a hand-held plasma cutter. Then I paint them so that they look just like as lifelike as possible.”

Art by Joan Herbert is what she calls her business venture, started a few years ago on her Neilburg farm.

“I prime the metal and use my oil paints on them. After that, I put a clear coat over them. I do mostly horses and cattle, or buffalo, and then paint them so that they look just like a painting or drawing. At times, I put spacers between them and make them look like they are three-dimensional.”

Weber’s pieces are almost too beautiful to stick on the lawn, and her art has generated some rather extreme reactions in the past:

“Last summer when there were so many gophers around and people would come in and see the gophers, they would say: ‘Why would you have the gophers? You put these lawn ornaments out and they’ll be full of bullet holes.’ I had someone at a show we just finished who bought one for his wife because she’d spent the summer trapping gophers. He thought it’d be a real joke to have one under the tree for Christmas.”

Seriously, this friendly entrepreneur is now getting all kinds of requests: from gate signs to trophies for team penning associations, coat racks and sculptured lampshades.

“Some people want my metal cuttings over their mantle as a feature piece. I actually started out doing pencil sketches and they were my mainstay for a while. Then I got into doing oil paintings and now, I’m into doing pastels on suede mat board also. I think I’m going to continue doing that. It is basically chalk pastel on suede mat and I think it has a real richness you just don’t get with the pencil drawings.”

Where does Herbert get her inspiration?

“I think it is doing what you are familiar with, and farm life is what I’m familiar with. I really enjoy doing animals and horses especially, and dogs, cattle, pigs from when we had pigs — everyday scenes of life on the farm or on ranches. I work a lot from photographs. I have albums of photos labeled as horses and dogs, farm scenes. That is sort of where I choose my work.”

Prolific as she is, Herbert is now fully engaged in the trade show circuit.

“We do about three or four trade shows a year: Agribition in the fall; in the summer, I’ve been doing a big show at Camrose Big Valley Jamboree, then a three-day show in the fall at Lloydminster. It can get busy.”

Fortunately for Herbert, it seems the market for folk art that depicts farm and ranch scenes of life in the Great Plain is not going away anytime soon.

For more information, contact:

Joan Herbert
(306) 823-4565