Hughes River Farm -- Home
Hughes River Farm and the Art Studio are located in Rappahannock County, Virginia. The Blue Ridge and Old Rag Mountain, a few miles to the west, challenge the ambitious hiker, and 
the Hughes River runs along the southern border of the farm. Canoeists find good sport here when the river runs high, and fishing is good even at low water.
The owner, Hans Wolfram Gerhard,
sells hay to his neighbors but dedicates much of his farm's acreage to wildlife habitat and recreational uses. There is an abundance of native flora and flowering shrubs as well as mixed stands of hardwoods and pines. Hans is planting still more trees for visitors to hug, lumberjacks to covet, and wildlife to find cover.
Hans has restored the dilapidated working farm, the old house and outbuildings. These 
include an art studio fashioned from an earlier chicken house. Here he paints his abstract paintings, carves wood into whimsical birds and beasts, and welds found metal objects into fantastic sculptures. With Christian, his wife, he hopes that children and children's children, and friends, will continue to visit the farm even from their homes in distant locations.
Hans enjoys nature as much as the arts. He was educated in his native Germany where he attended Goettingen University and Tuebingen University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and pursued an academic career in the United States, teaching at Duke University and the University of California at Los Angeles (U.C.L.A.). He studied Art at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC. However, most of his artistic inspiration and learning came from visiting museums and galleries, and from artists encountered along the way. As an artist, Hans sees himself in the tradition of German modernism, admiring the work of artists associated with Der Blaue Reiter and Die Bruecke, Kurt Schwitters, Paul Klee and Max Ernst, but he also was inspired by American Pop 
Art and the Washington Color School. His own work has been shown by the Franz Bader Gallery in Washington, DC, as well as by other galleries in Washington, Virginia, and elsewhere. Some of his works are in collections of public institutions in the USA and in private collections in the US and in Europe.
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