Essays from Connected to Place: Landscape Paintings by Fred Easker
Over the years, several writers, curators, and colleagues have looked closely at my work, exploring how light, memory, and geography shape what I paint and how I see. These essays — originally published in Connected to Place: Landscape Paintings by Fred Easker — each approach the idea of place from a different angle. Together they form a kind of conversation about the familiar land we share and the ways art can reveal what we thought we already knew.
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.”
Fred Easker and the Particularity of Place
By Julia Kellman, Professor Emerita of Art Education, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“Fred Easker’s Iowa landscapes, predominantly of Northeast and East Central Iowa, reflect the artist’s lifelong intimacy with these areas—the light that washes over them, the sky that encloses them, and the land that forms their steep bluffs, curving fields, and rolling hills.”
A Gallerist’s View
By Janelle McClain, Art Consultant and Gallerist
Former Owner, Corner House Gallery, Cedar Rapids
“There was a time in the art world when landscape and all things representational were discouraged, a time when they were downright frowned upon. In my opinion and in the opinion of so many others, we are fortunate that Fred Easker ignored the trends.”
Reflections on Light and Influence
By Sean Ulmer, Executive Director, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art
“Fred Easker tells the story of going to junior high school and seeing Grant Wood’s Young Corn, an iconic painting of Wood’s post-1930 mature style. While not considering a life as a landscape painter at the time, Easker nonetheless acknowledges how seeing that painting nearly every day had an influence on him. While there are visual relationships between these two premier Iowa artists, there is also a philosophical one.”
All essays originally appeared in Connected to Place: Landscape Paintings by Fred Easker (2018). Available through this link: Book →