Rez Williams’ Cedar Tree Neck Poster
By Kate Feiffer
We hope and suspect that the cover of this newsletter caught your eye. This past winter, Adam Moore and board member Sara Tucker came up with the idea of creating a poster reminiscent of, and inspired by, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) National Park Service posters that were commissioned during the New Deal. The Coronavirus pandemic was just starting to restructure daily life as we knew it, when Adam and Sara approached former SMF board member and current honorary director Rez Williams about creating an image for the poster. Now, with unemployment levels at their highest rate since the Great Depression, the timing of this poster strikes an eerie chord.
“There is nothing so American as our National Parks,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in 1934. Soon thereafter, the National Parks poster project was launched. A total of fourteen posters, depicting iconic images from the different parks, were designed to encourage people to visit the parks during the dark days of the Depression. Unfortunately, the names of most of the artists who worked on these posters are not documented. An estimated 1,400 posters were printed and while only a few of the originals have survived, their look and legacy has had a lasting impact.
“It’s interesting to look at this in our current times,” Adam said recently while discussing this project. “I think the poster shows the enduring value of conservation. I think it shows that conservation always has value, in good times and in bad.”
Sara Tucker, who has been on the SMF board since 2018, has been active in spearheading projects which help raise awareness of SMF through marketing initiatives. (Readers have hopefully bought several of the new SMF baseball caps which are available in five different colors, including blaze orange for hunting season.) Sara also came up with the idea of making SMF bandanas, which are currently particularly useful.
Three of the original WPA National Parks posters.
“I had been thinking about ways to get people more excited about promotional stuff around SMF,” Sara said during a recent phone call. “My thinking was that we should do annual posters featuring a Sheriffs Meadow property.”
The poster was discussed at a winter Sheriff’s Meadow Board meeting. At that meeting, John Schaefer recommended asking Rez Williams to consider painting the scene for the poster.
In February, Adam called Rez and asked if he’d be interested. “I had seen the WPA posters. They’re basically serigraphs, silk screens, which is a printing method where you use different screens for different colors and the result is an image that has very flat layers of color. I said that’s not really what an oil painting does. I said it’s an intriguing idea, but I don’t know if I can pull it off in an oil painting,” Rez explained, adding, “But then I was looking at some of the stuff that I’ve been working on lately and there are a lot of flat areas in the landscape paintings I’ve been doing. So I said, I’ll give it a try.” Designer Kathleen Forsythe was brought into the project, and everyone involved agreed that the poster should honor Cedar Tree Neck. “It actually came together pretty quickly,” said Rez. “I found that I was doing something that I thought resembled the WPA look—the cream-colored cumulus clouds, that was sort of classic 1930’s early 40’s stuff, as was a big iconic rock formation.”
Kathleen describes her role in the process: “For me, the process was about defining the “mission” of this poster. Obviously the main objective is to create awareness around Sheriff’s Meadow properties, but we also want it to be something that one would want to frame and hang in his/her home, like a museum poster. So therefore, the design, even though there are only a few elements, has to convey that nuance and sophistication of fine art, and not appear overly promotional and commercial. That’s the challenge here. The subtleties in the integration of typography have to be just right to achieve that nuance. So it requires many iterations, exploring various placement of elements, size relationships, typographic hierarchy and exhausting all the possibilities.”
Rez has generously donated his time and the original painting to Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation. “We gratefully accept this donation,” said Adam. At a future date, the original painting will hang in the Sheriff’s Meadow office for SMF staff and visitors to enjoy.
For information about purchasing a 14” x 19” Cedar Tree Neck poster (as well as baseball caps and bandanas), please contact Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation at info@sheriffsmeadow.org.