The worker

As one of the exercises I worked through for my online course, I chose a worker, planting rice in a paddy field. When looking for reference photos, I stumbled across the humble rice paddy worker, and there was something about them, I deeply admired...

I respect the fact their civilisation, took to feeding themselves by the sweat of their own brow. There's no industrial agriculture here, feeding extremely large populations. Their food is somewhat sacred, by maintaining their annual pact with the land, to respect the paddy field. Sacred, because they placed themselves delicately in the environment which would feed them. Complimentary to abundance.

Any civilisation which still feeds itself like this, is ahead of the Western civilisation pack, in my opinion. Because they have natural equity to farm from, instead of depletion and erosion. The people themselves also have beautiful environments to work in, without heavy pollution and cumbersome infrastructure.

So it was with great admiration and respect, I captured their important work in their sacred office. Truly worth committing to paper. The IXL charcoal blocks I worked with, complimented this earthy subject beautifully too. In some cases, like the trees and bamboo in the background, I barely had to scrape the surface.

For so many reasons, I really enjoyed working on this piece.