THE SUNDAY DRIVES

We are a nation of drivers and a good portion of our lives are spent looking out at the world from the windows of a speeding car. This gives us a truncated view of the world -- we can't see up or down, only out and to the side, and then only for a moment. We catch a glimpse of a scene and then we are on to the next view, over the next hill, around the next curve. We don’t experience the world like our ancestors, who lived at a much more leisurely pace - we experience it from afar and in a blur.  But our flat Midwestern topography may be the perfect landscape to be viewed this way. There is little up but the sky and little below but the ground. Everything is horizon.

In an attempt to capture this, I use a long, squat series of connected canvases.  I keep the subject simple without a lot of detail, concentrating instead on light and color. The paintings are meant to be quick impressions of our native landscape, just like we are used to seeing them. And hopefully like all my paintings they can illustrate once again that there is simple beauty all around us, if we only open our eyes to see, no matter how fast it goes zooming by.