Stanley Holik is a cotton farmer in Wall, a farming community in West Texas. He is a one-man enterprise.

After graduating from Art School I had to return to my homeland Austria due to Visa restrictions. When I got home I was lost in a number of ways.

The preceeding three years had been intense on a personal, educational and social level. I had fully immersed myself into developing as an artist and in that process had found very close friends.

The intensity of self-development and the intensity of my American family – it all was gone the moment I disembarked the plane in Vienna, Austria.

I had trouble reintegrating into my old social environment and a close relationship broke a couple of months after I had returned.

Then Stanley, father-in-law of my closest friend in grad school, emailed that he was expecting a record cotton harvest that year and was looking for a farmhand to help. I bought a plane ticket the same day to go pick cotton in Texas.

The pace of farming life, the everyday connection to the land, the calm tiredness after a day’s work, but especially the conversations with Stanley – in one of which he mentioned that we are supposed to live in a realm of questions – helped me find my feet again.