Horizon Statement:
For over two decades I’ve been captivated by the prairie horizon. I’ve studied it in every season and every daylight hour. Always, what most impresses and moves me is the blue-beyond-the-blue ridge lines. Repeatedly studying the ineffable blue of distance that is part earth, part mirage, and part atmosphere, has evolved into rich composites of memory and imagination to draw upon in the studio.
The parallel lines of the solid, flat-topped uplands and eroded valleys comprise this unique topography, and set the Flint Hills Tallgrass prairies apart from all other landscapes. These are my “benchmark” horizons, the best examples of prairie horizons that I’ve experienced. There are vaster, flatter prairies in places such as the panhandle regions of Oklahoma or Texas but they don’t have the same kinds of escarpment lines and features that provide scale, leading the eye into a deeper atmospheric distance and a sense of limitlessness. The solidity and silence of the hills, the particular layering of seasons and storms, and animal and human migrations over millennia, shaped this terrain. To me, it exudes a timeless and enduring quality.
After painting innumerable horizons in the field, I created some studio pieces to narrow my impressions down to their purest form—distilled, concentrated, elemental sensations of light, color, and line, with the unique geology and optical phenomena that combine to create the visual effect of great, soaring distances. When I began delineating the horizons in luscious ridges of paint, it felt strangely indulgent to be able to focus entirely on the sensation of the horizon, remembering and recreating the idea of it. Carving out those lines, over and over, was intensely satisfying…making distance but never arriving, comfortable with not reaching a destination but reveling in anticipation and longing, “having” all that space to settle into. I was painting the feeling of Far.