A lot of rocks in this field.
I feel like I should do something with them.
My name is Stan Hurd and I'm an artist, landscape artist, earthworks artist.
I've been creating images on farm fields and other places for Jiminy.
40 years, something like that.
You know, I went to Wichita State on an art scholarship back in 1968
and wanted to be an avant-garde abstract expressionist
and worked very hard at it for years and it just wasn't really me.
So at one point I went back to my roots.
I went to Dodge City to watch my brother play football.
I went to college there and that's when in an airplane flight
I first looked down and went, oh my god, I could do something in the ground
and that took four years to do the first piece
and then I've been trying to perfect it ever since.
So I had an incredible call last year about the possibility
of doing something with the museum here in Minneapolis
and obviously when an artist hears something like that they get pretty excited
and I even became more excited when I realized
the possibilities of creating something in the ground
with probably one of my favorite artists in the world which is Vincent van Gogh.
We're going to try to create the piece on probably about one acre
and made out of all kinds of materials.
Just off the airport where planes will land
so that everybody on the left side of the aircraft will be able to look out and see our van go.
I've always had a fascination with van Gogh and he was one of the artists
whose stories I connected with really early.
So when I walk in here and I see this painting
the first thing I look at is, oh let's see what plants
and what soil and what mulch and what things might I pull into this.
You know we're out here on the field as you see
the big airplanes coming in over Yankee Doodle and Dodd here.
This feels about I guess four acres and I'm on about an acre and a half of it.
So we're on the campus of Thompson Reuter
and we are standing right in the base of this.
You can see this is darker so I'm planting these kind of more verdant green plants.
Everything you know in van Gogh's stroke were slashes of color.
The amazing thing about van Gogh's painting is there's not a single straight line in the whole canvas.
Everything is organic and curved and flowing and it's like a pulse.
I'm just amazed that after months of looking at one painting
that I continue to discover things in it.
There are actually times when I just kind of set out here and just think
I'm setting in van Gogh, you know.
It hit me the other day that I was working on this one tree back here
and it was just that connection.
Everything is just this snake like serpentine flow of things.
Well I think this is what van Gogh saw.
I mean he just everything was moving for him.
Everything was moving and everything moved together.
When he wrote Theo on this particular painting and he said
note how the sun dances in the tree tops
and you look here and there's the sun dancing in the tree tops.
You know when I'm here I don't see bare ground and mulch and pots.
I just I see the painting.
