Other Places
The development of my landscape paintings can be traced through a slowly expanding territory. It is important to me to spend time in a place—to feel a connection to it, to understand what distinguishes it, and to discover what within it compels a response. My aesthetic sensibility was shaped by the gently former prairie where I have lived nearly all my life. At times, however, unanticipated opportunities have drawn me beyond that familiar ground.
Time spent in the southwest Iowa town of Mt. Ayr while assisting a friend with the conservation of a WPA mural in the local post office allowed several days to explore a region I had not previously known.
In 2005, a commission to create a large painting for a civic center under construction in Ottumwa required repeated trips over several months to the banks of the Des Moines River, which cuts across southeast Iowa. The resulting work—my largest canvas to date—is installed in the Bridgeview Center, and several additional paintings grew out of that time along the river.
In 2010, a writer known to me only because he had purchased a small painting years earlier invited my wife and me to stay with him near Bar Harbor. He framed the invitation as a way of getting me out of my comfort zone, offering not just a place to stay and meals, but time—time for conversation and for exploring the Maine coast. Those days placed me in a landscape unlike any I had previously worked in.
My son and his family live in Colorado, and over a number of visits the mountains there—along with the long crossings of the prairie required to reach them—have influenced how I think about space and distance in my Iowa paintings. I expect that additional work beyond those shown here will continue to emerge from that experience.
