Greenfield Square Print

The Sponsorship and Development department are selling the picture to earn money.  The painting can be purchased at the Chamber/Main Street office for $40.00. 

Artist Artemis Housewright was commissioned by Hugh Sidey to paint a picture of the way the Greenfield Square appeared in the 1950's.  Prints can be ordered from the Greenfield Chamber/Main Street office at 641-743-8444.

The painting has the following paragraph under the painting. 

  Artemis Jegart Housewright is an artist of national acclaim who lives in Frederick, Maryland. She began her career in Florida and has also painted in the Southwest United States, Greece, Spain, Mexico and the Caribbean. This is her first work from the Midwest, a new part of the country for her brush, but one that inspired her as much as any when she learned about the natural rhythms and colors of Iowa. In this painting it is fall in Greenfield with the Square crowned with bronze, thinning leaves from the elm trees which grew there in the 1950's, roughly the time frame for the picture. Geese are flying south, the leaves swirling up in the brisk prairie wind which snaps the flag, the sky a bright October blue. There are a few other "old friends" which I asked her to put in the painting: the perpetual pigeons on the Opera House roof and a pair of Redtailed hawks, the kind my father, Kenneth Sidey, then Editor and Publisher of the Adair County Free Press, wrote about from his nature walks out over the Cumberland Rose rail right-of-way. I asked that an image of my father with his faithful camera be included and there he is on the courthouse steps in his hat and bowtie with his camera at the ready. The buildings and signs were painstakingly reconstructed from clips out of the Free Press, from my extensive collection of photographs and slides and other illustrations. There was one surprise. Unbeknownst to me, Ms. Housewright painted in a friend with a model airplane and myself with my dog Spot, a long-time citizen of the Square. We are seated to the far left on the cast iron facade of what was the Golden Rule store. Everyday I look up from my library desk and see the painting which is over my fireplace and everytime I see it, old and wonderful memories stir within me and I am once again a proud and happy son of Greenfield. 

Hugh Sidey