Fred Easkers Poetic Vision

By Joni Kinsey, Professor Emerita of Art History, University of Iowa.

Fred Easker's landcape paintings offer an extraordinary view into what is too often considered ordinary. Most often drawing on familiar sites in the backroads of his native eastern Iowa, he celebrates both the aesthetics and the character of place and offers a keen meditation on the power, vulnerability, and eloquence of land and our relationship to it.

Easker's views can seem deceptively straightforward. Strongly naturalistic in form, his images luxuriate in light, color, landforms, and lush vegetation, especially the expansive and often rolling terrain of his home region. In this alone the works are a visual feast, a pastoral symphony, but on closer observation they reveal their subject even more perceptively. Within the subtleties of form, the contrasts of tone, and the paradoxes of hue, lie a latent energy, an understated strength, and a modest but profound wisdom that speaks to the true nature of place. Once this quality is recognized neither the paintings nor the subjects they address can ever be so common ²again; they emerge as provocative revelations with the power to transform the very way we see ourselves and the world around us.

Easker paints from photographs he takes on "discovery" drives, but his finished images are more than painted photographs. The artist points to what has occurred as the image has evolved and the contemplation has developed; a transformation has taken place that distinguishes the painting from both the site and the photograph. The final images are meticulous in their detail, but more painterly than they appear at first glance, and more importantly they have a new identity. The canvases are unique constructed visions, not merely translations of objective reality.

Easker’s spring views are especially stunning, but his scenes of other seasons are equally compelling. He finds the spring not only the most beautiful scenically and coloristically, but also psychologically, as it is a time of promise and new beginnings. The light seems fresher, the colors more intense, the contrasts more distinct at this time of year, and he captures this directly through careful attention to nature and by subtle manipulation of the hues, values, and intensities of paint. In summer the fullness of life seems paramount, with mature corn creating lush patterns amid the rolling panorama, and in autumn the light crystalizes, seeming to cast a spell over a world caught in time. In winter, as in Winter Creek, the frozen world fairly glistens, heightening the shadows and the sepia tones of the grasses amid the snow.

One important aspect in Easker's paintings, or in any vision of landscape for that matter, is the point of view. Most of his images are from a human perspective; they are positioned neither very low nor are they unusually elevated. With a few exceptions his views do not embody the "majesterial gaze" that surveys a scene from a floating position of power and prominence, or the "reverential gaze" of the supplicant from below.ⁱ

This makes Easker's landscapes more readily accessible; we are invited to contemplate them at our own level and consider our intimate connection with the land ³and its changing character.

On the other hand, the artist admits he is sometimes "seduced" by the more grandiose prospect, positions from which it is possible to see a more panoramic sweep of terrain. More often he widens his scope of vision from the same point of view, broadening his canvases to incorporate that encompassing perspective. These epic views beguile with their expansive scope, offering a sense of magnanimity that more focused attention or constricting framing does not offer. In these scenes the land takes on a monumentality and its seemingly latent energy is made palpable, even dominant. This drama is intensified by Easker’s predilection for canvases that emphasize width over height. These proportions are sometimes startling, simultaneously drawing us in and sweeping us across, prompting close attention and nuanced thought. This enlarging effect is consistent regardless of scale; it is especially pronounced in his large canvases such as Mississippi Autumn or Grandview, but equally true of very small works whose jewel-like quality is coupled with a surprising enormity of effect.

Easker's landscapes are almost always unpeopled. They usually contain evidence of human use (after all, today’s Iowa retains less than one percent of its original native prairie) in the form of crops, dwellings, animals, farm buildings (usually pushed deep into the background), or bridges--but the inhabitants who have shaped these places are elsewhere. Even so, as Easker notes, the Midwestern land is rather like its people--understated, dispassionate, and modest. It contains, however, a subtle power, an "energy from within" which, for Easker, is the key to understanding its beauty and significance.

Recently Easker has expanded his subject matter through epic views of the Rocky Mountains, as in Estes Evervescence, which in their enormity of vision rival the work of the great nineteenth century painters Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) or Thomas Moran (1837-1926). The canvases of those artists and their contemporaries reveled in the ⁴spectacle of the West and indelibly altered Americans’ perceptions of their country. Easker’s version of Colorado is no less revelatory as it is suffused with clouds and light and encompasses an extraordinary space, an expansive glory that is only rivaled by the place itself.

Although Easker's painting has all the accomplishment of long training, he is essentially self-taught, a fact he admits with some pride. He has been involved with art making since high school, he taught art at the secondary level, and he earned both his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in art education, but his technical and visual abilities are largely a product of independent study, pursued over years of private struggle with different media, inspirations, subjects, and techniques.

Some of his earliest paintings were portraits of family members, painted in the photorealist style of the 1970s. Through the 1980s he concentrated on still lifes, usually drawn in prismacolor pencils but with a brilliance unusual to that medium. Those years were interspersed with many other projects--teaching at Linn Mar High School, working at the Cedar Rapids Art Museum, and supervising the restoraton of the historic Granger House in Marion, Iowa, but on his own time Easker was painstakingly learning to draw and paint, exploring different materials, and becoming familiar with the contemporary scene and the historic traditions of art which form the basis for his current work.

He cites American art history as an important influence and regards his local predecessors, Grant Wood (1882-1942) and Marvin Cone (1898-1994), as inspirations, as well as earlier landscapists such as Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) and other mid- nineteenth century painters who explored luminous coloristic effects in their paintings. Easker studied the historical tradition in several courses at the University of Iowa in the 1980s, through exhibitions at various museums, and via a number of books such as John Wilmerding's American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850-1875 (1980) which was such a ⁵favorite that Easker went to great pains to acquire an out-of-print copy after it was no longer readily available. It is no surprise that the luminous work of the mid-nineteenth century painters such as John Kensett or Martin Johnson Heade would be of special interest; Easker’s work scintillates with a clarity of light that is surpassed only by those masters of crystalline atmosphere.

More recent art is also an inspiration. Easker points to the meditative qualities of the work of Mark Rothko, the energy of Jackson Pollock, and the abstract clarity within the larger formal structures of Joseph Raffael's imagery as important to his own conceptual and formal approach and he even finds parallels to his own art in Minimalism. His work is grounded in strong formal structures of space, plane, color, and line, and although it is not abstract it shares with that tradition a devotion to form.

It was only at the end of the 1980s that Easker turned to landscape as a subject for his own painting, inspired especially by the countryside through which he passed on his frequent drives between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City during his graduate school years. For all of its novelty this new direction was actually a turning back for Easker, a rediscovery of his own past in which his favorite place as a child was the farm of friends near Ely, Iowa. When he finally embarked on serious study of landscape imagery, his first paintings were of that area. Most importantly, perhaps, Easker's turn toward landscape was a confirmation of his own taste and a recognition that he no longer needed to rely on the approval of others or refer to the current trends in the art world.

He had found himself as an artist. The Iowa landscape was his subject, and through it he found his own visual voice. As he wrote in his Master's thesis in 1989:

When I decided to work just for myself without a mind to whether what I was doing was acceptable for graduate school or was significant in terms of the greater art world, I put art in another context, a context that was positive and immensely satisfying, the context of myself. My success then, my sense of accomplishment would come from me.

Externally defined success would occur only when its definitions were congruous to my own.ⁱⁱ

⁶For all of his identification with the terrain he depicts, Easker does not, however, regard his subject matter as a social or political statement and he is reluctant to offer too much explanation of his works’ meaning or implications. Nevertheless, like the nineteenth-century landscape paintings that inspire him, Easker’s work evokes a larger significance that connects it to a wide array of issues, from transcendental associations with divine providence to nationalistic associations. After all, Iowa and its neighbors are renowned as “America’s Heartland.” And Easker is troubled by recent trends in rural America, saying that "A way of life that was sustaining is disappearing, and is being replaced by something I'm not sure is so sustaining," even as he is suspicious of politically-motivated art. "It is not as lasting as other kinds...and painting is not a good way to motivate change." Even if that is true Easker’s work inspires a deep respect for nature in all of its forms, a fundamental idea that in America is nothing if not politically significant.

Easker wants his art to be accessible to viewers, with or without explanation, but he acknowledges that it is not simply about representation, even as he hesitates to articulate what else it might be. "For me," he writes, "one of the great rewards of making anything is the sense of accomplishment...of bringing into being what before did not exist." iii

For viewers his art offers the same pleasure; as we view Fred Easker's paintings we recognize the creative power that lies in his hands, in the land, and within ourselves.