WOOD, GRANT

born Feb. 13, 1892, near Anamosa, Iowa, U.S. died Feb. 12, 1942, Iowa City, Iowa American painter who was one of the major exponents of Midwestern Regionalism, a movement that flourished in the United States during the 1930s. Wood was trained as a craftsman and designer as well as a painter. After spending a year (1923) at the Acadmie Julian in Paris, he returned to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where in 1927 he was commissioned to do a stained-glass window. Knowing little about stained glass, he went to Germany to seek craftsmen to assist him. While there he was deeply influenced by the sharply detailed paintings of various German and Flemish masters of the 16th century. Wood subsequently abandoned his Impressionist style and began to paint in the sharply detailed, realistic manner by which he is now known. A portrait of his mother in this style, Woman with Plants (1929), did not attract attention, but in 1930 his American Gothic caused a sensation when it was exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago. The hard, cold realism of this painting and the honest, direct, earthy quality of its subject were unusual in American art. The work ostensibly portrays a farmer-preacher and his daughter in front of their farmhouse, but Wood actually used his sister, Nan, and his dentist, B.H. McKeeby, as models. As a telling portrait of the sober and hard-working rural dwellers of the Midwest, the painting has become one of the best-known icons of American art. Wood became one of the leading figures of the Regionalist movement. Another well-known painting by him is Daughters of Revolution (1932), a satirical portrait of three unattractive old women who appear smugly satisfied with their American Revolutionary ancestry. In 1934 Wood was made assistant professor of fine arts at the University of Iowa, Iowa City. Among his other principal works are several paintings illustrating episodes from American history and a series of Midwestern rural landscapes that communicate a strong sense of American ambience by means of a skillful simplification of form. Harvesting the wood crop A prerequisite to harvest is a management plan, which determines the yearly yield and the method of removal. The harvest method chosen can involve clear-cutting large areas or selective cutting of individual trees or groups of trees. For a forest harvested under the sustained-yield concept the volume of timber removed at periodic time intervals is dependent on the net growth of all trees during that interval. This concept, combined with natural and artificial seeding and planting, ensures a continuous production of wood and conservation of forests. The season of harvest is not determined by the time of ripening, as with agricultural crops, but by such factors as the conditions of work for personnel, machines and animals, and the danger of damage to the remaining forest and to the harvested wood. Because felled trees are vulnerable to attack by fungi and insects, the harvest is timed to avoid conditions favourable for these organisms. Harvesting includes felling, bucking (cross-cutting into logs), limbing, debarking, and skidding (i.e., moving the logs from the felling location) to the roadside or concentration yard, from where the logs are transported to industries. Felling is commonly accomplished by chain saw; the ax and handsaw are little used today. The chain saw is also used for bucking and in most cases for limbing. Bucking is not always done at the felling site. Sometimes whole trees are skidded to a concentration yard for further processing. Debarking is sometimes done in the forest by ax or spud (a combination spade and chisel) or by portable mechanical debarkers, and sometimes in factories by stationary mechanical debarkers or water jets. Special equipment has been developed for harvesting pulpwood. An example is a combine harvester equipped with giant scissors, which shear the tree at the base. It is then lifted to a carriage and drawn through a trimmer, which strips off the branches. Another blade bucks the trunk into logs, which fall into an attached cradle. Sometimes the entire tree, including its branches, is chipped in the woods. The chips are blown directly into a truck or are carried by pipeline to a pulp mill. Skidding is done by tractors or by animals; in various forests of the world, horses, mules, oxen, and elephants are employed. Tractors are usually employed in combination with steel cables, and the logs are skidded on the ground or lifted partially or wholly off the ground. In the northwest United States tall trees, 80100 metres high, are topped by a climbing logger and are employed as masts, or spar trees, to attach cables for skidding. In rare cases where slopes are steep and erosive, helicopters or giant balloons are used. In general, mechanization of harvesting operations is the trend, but regions of small annual yield and unfavourable topography restrict the potential of expensive machines, and in many countries human and animal labour is still commonly used. The main source of usable wood is the tree trunk. Tree tops and heavy branches are cut into short lengths for cordwood and stacked wood, or they are chipped. Stumps, which should be as low as possible, roots, logging residues, and bark, if logs are debarked, remain in the forest. Machines also have been designed to extract the roots of the trees. This technique is employed to some degree in the coniferous forests of the southeastern United States. Wood utilization This section is concerned with the main products of primary processing of wood, and related treatments, such as drying and preservation, that ensure its better performance in use. Some of these products, such as poles, posts, and railroad ties, are used directly, but most constitute intermediate materials that by further processing are manufactured into final products or structures.