Ex–Bad Boy Pastoral

Dan Colen is still painting. But instead of raising hell, he’s raising pigs and sheep.

- Matthew Schneier

HIS BOOTS SUNK in pig shit, his head rising six feet six inches above them, Dan Colen, 40, is at home, a giant silhouetted against a gray Columbia County sky. Once he was young, wild, and downtown notorious: In 2007, he appeared on the cover of this magazine, spooning his also notorious best friends, the artists Dash Snow and Ryan McGinley, in what didn’t appear to be a very clean bed. Snow died of a heroin overdose two years later; Colen and McGinley got sober.

In 2011, Colen bought what he named Sky High Farm. “I was at a point where I felt I needed to get out of the city,” he tells me over a lunch of egg salad and greens. He keeps cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, turkeys, and a donkey called Joy and grows broccoli, lettuce, carrots, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes. There are bees; there’s an orchard. The farm is set up as a nonprofit, a 501(c)3, and he donates what it produces to food banks to help those in need.