More Coming - The Barn Artists

Farmstead is excited to have The Barn Artists here too.... Kathy Truders (potter) began her journey with pottery in
the late 1980s. Her love of horses has been lifelong. She feels forturnate
to be able to combine her two passions, horses and pottery,
at her home in rural Platte County, Missouri. Both provide constant
sources of joy, fascination, inspiration, and unceasing challenges
in her quest for knowledge and improvement of skills. The beauty,
strength, and grace of the horse are the blessings she strives to
incorporate into her pottery. Centering, shaping, and understanding
the clay are what she brings from her pottery studio to her work
in the field or the arena with her horses. In her journey, Kathy has
found that along with all of her great human teachers, these two--horses and clay--are wonderful teachers as
well.

Carl Wilson (multi-media artist), when not creating or
learning a new media, fills in the gaps by teaching beginning
horseback riding and working around the Wild Rose Equine Center
in northern Platte County with his wife Robbin. Carl is a self
taught artist and enjoys working in leather, woodcarving, and most
recently color-pencil drawings. He believes enjoying what you are
doing and continually adding to the pot of knowledge keeps things
interesting. After a 30-plus year career of riding horses, travelling
the country, before settling in rural Platte County, Carl is beginning
to concentrate more on his art than his horsemanship these days.
His studio at Wild Rose offers up carvings in relief and sculpture, both natural and color-enhanced, plus drawings
of whatever interests him that day. Tree branches found on his 60 acres will become an occasional walking
stick through the artistry of Carl’s tools. Horsemanship learned over the years has been an asset, Carl has
found, in the discipline and creativity needed in the artist’s world.


Bill Hankins (photographer) retired from teaching photography
and journalism after 30 years in education. He now freelances
photos and feature stories for The Platte County Landmark. In 2008,
he was inducted into the Missouri Photojournalism Hall of Fame.
Bill’s Walking in the Light Images are what he calls his “assignments
from within.” He enjoys shooting the landscapes and peoples
of the American West, but has concentrated in more recent years on
documenting the lives and places of home, Platte County, Missouri.
Philosophically, writer Henry David Thoreau inspires his shooting
style. When Thoreau wrote about “a moment’s monument” in his
journals, he was not referring to photography, but rather a way of living in the here and now, “to improve the
nick of time, to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment.”
“What better definition of a photograph is there?” Hankins has written. “First with film and now digitally,
I have tried to prepare myself so that at whatever shutter speed I can capture a monument to a moment that
will in some way enhance the human experience--to remind us, to enlighten us, to reveal to us, to entertain us.”

We have already shown some of Bill's wonderful photography... but we will be showing more shortly along with the other artists work. Come back soon!