We caught up with the brilliant and insightful John G White a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

John G, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

Was there ever a time? Writing and photography have been part of me since high school. I’ve been rather fortunate to have created both a journalist and artistic “career” from my inner passions. I’ve always been creative whether it is in cooking, working with wood or even earning my way through college playing in a rock band. I don’t know of any other way and feel fortunate the paths, if that’s what they’re called, opened for me.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My career in journalism was spent mainly doing stories on other people. Most of that time was with newspapers, both large dailies and finally with a country weekly in the Minnesota prairie. After leaving the Denver Post in 1976, I spent six years as a freelance photojournalist with credits in more than 70 magazines. One of those magazines then hired me as an editor in 1982 and we moved from Denver to the St. Paul, MN area. At Webb Publishing I worked as an associate editor before being named managing editor of a couple of agricultural irrigation magazines. After the company was purchased I moved to Miller-Meester Advertising where I served as publications director. When that ended, I worked with a former art director on two closed circulation magazines for a couple of years before he died unexpectedly of a brain tumor. I finished my working career running a small country weekly newspaper before I retired in 2012 when my wife died. While at the weekly I realized I was living in a completely extinct prairie ecosystem. Yes, 99 precent of the prairie pothole biome had been destroyed to make way for commodity farming and its support system … small towns and related services. All but a few of prairie potholes remaining from the glaciation had been ditched and tiled, and less than one percent of the native prairie had been plowed under. Capturing this last one percent then became my passion, and has led to an arts career that now enters its 12th year. I purchased a small, 14 acre farm and planted a prairie on the eight tillable acres and have maintained the woodland. A studio was built over a demolished grain bin where I display my canvasses and prints, and where I host about four house concerts over a year. I exhibit in juried and one-person shows, and publish a blog based on nature and natural experiences.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Years ago during an exhibition a man told me he had grown up on a small farm within 100 miles of mine, and didn’t realize until he had viewed my work that the land and prairie offered so much beauty. “Had I realized the beauty you’ve created here, maybe I wouldn’t have moved.” I’ve had others make comments such as: “You’re an artist … with a camera.” It seems there is a chasm between “painted” art and “photographic art” and this observer put my artistic vision on equal plain, that my camera was like the brushes of a painter, of the wheel for a potter. While I love selling and exhibiting my work, I have found such comments quite rewarding. Yet it still comes down to recognizing the quality of light, the nuances of composition, and creating an image that touches the soul.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

With 99 percent of both the prairie land and potholes no longer in existence, and with the grasp of that land for a need of the bounty of the various crops grown on those lands, it is highly unlikely the prairies will be returned to their former glory. No one alive has ever envisioned what it might have been like before Euro-immigration and the great plow down. So really, restoring some of the lands, particularly those vulnerable to both wind and water erosion, is certainly a goal. Short of that I would thoroughly love for viewers of my art to learn to appreciate what little we have remaining and to treat that land and those potholes with respect. One of my projects was entitled the “Art of Erosion,” that has been hanged on numerous walls and was included in the traveling Water Works exhibit of the Smithsonian. It depicts the odd beautify of wind-blown dirt mainly on snow, or what folks around here call “snirt” … dirt on snow. Broken prairie lands used in row cropping are often left barren from harvest to plant cover, meaning that some of those fields are left unprotected from the wind for six to eight months. Some of the more caring farmers have begun to plant cover crops to protect those soils. Numerous soil scientists and authors have warned that we’re now farming the last productive soils remaining on our planet, and once they’re eroded away, then what? So while I seem to have a desire to portray this last one percent of a extinct biome, there is also a need to focus on preserving what is left of what we have destroyed.

Contact Info:

• Website: listeningstonesfarm.com/ John G. White Photos.com
• Facebook: John G. White Photos

Image Credits
John G. White Photos