ARTISTS' AND POETS' STATEMENTS

Before 1968-70, the main theme of my work was nonfigurative. Coming to terms with challenges of the new environment, landscape became my main motif and I have portrayed the seasonal changes and the land forms of this region since this time. The drawings and paintings completed in the sixties and seventies were fore-runners of my involvement today with a group of artists who have taken the Midwest landscape image as their theme. In 1993, my work was included in an exhibition in the Bloomington Center for Art. The exhibition was titled, "A View from Here, Painters of the Heartland." In summer 1994, I was one of five artists to be invited to write an essay on the spiritual content of their work. Titled, "Wind Swept Plains and other Sacred Places," it was published in fall 1995, in Providence College's Studies in Western Civilization. Essentially, my work revolves around a sense of place. My home is in two cultures and two countries. In the various visits to my village in Wales, it is easy to adjust to the life style. When in Macomb, the feeling is that this has been my home for all of my life. These collective experiences have led to a series of works that are representative of a richly rewarding experience.
- Fred Jones

Since 1973, using acrylic, oil, and watercolor, I have continuously explored a photo-derived aerial format. The aerial view (flatscape) takes advantage of a view that is now commonplace but which in the nineteenth century was quite special. Because an aerial view offers an overall flat plane, the planar recession provided by Renaissance perspective is not necessary to define space. Instead of perspective linearity, the space can be formed by color forces compatibly fused with flat, simply described, geometrically sectioned farm imagery. With my "flatscape" paintings I hope to picture an ebullient, energetic color array that reaches beyond decorative enhancement or tapestry enrichment to offer an ordered, relational color strength intended to help consider, suggest, or make evident the positive sense of well-being discoverable in the Midwest landscape.
- Harold Gregor

Sometimes I think of my paintings in terms of theater, where a dramatic story is unfolding on stage before an audience. Low horizon lines allow for the description of dominant skies while creating a sense of expansiveness in my work. Through the use of glazes I achieve a glowing ambient light that subtly graduates to darkness. All objects, trees, and buildings are generally illuminated from behind, enhancing the drama. The lone tree and the weathered tree are important, often repeated motifs symbolizing the struggle of the individual and of overcoming adversity. My oil paintings are done on a beveled canvas that lifts the central picture plane three inches off the wall. This element gives the painting a certain physical presence, turning it into an object that extends into space, physically engaging the viewer. The beveled edges are darkened so that the luminosity of the sky emanates from the center of the painting. This underscores the light vs. dark, good vs. evil metaphor. Dichotomy plays a central role in my work. This paradox poses a philosophical question: will darkness persist or will the unifying light prevail? Through these contrasts I hope to make my viewers aware of and contemplate the struggles that may exist in their own lives. My goal is to connect with the viewers at this level, making them active participants in the creative process. The vitality of a painting in my mind rests not in its ability to answer questions, but rather to ask them, thus keeping the painting open and alive.
- Michael Dubina

I would like to in some measure share with the viewer that uplifting spiritual presence I sense residing in the land. I am trying to address the aesthetic of the sublime, a glimpse of the Orderer in His order. More than to inform, l want the viewer to be moved emotionally. Therefore, in my pictures the compositional elements, especially value, color and line are adjusted to embrace that harmonic sense of transcendent purpose in nature. I want to paint scenes of a place where you think you might hear ". . . the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day." (Genesis 3:8)
- James R. Winn

My involvement with the imagery of the rural Midwest began in 1982. Based upon an early fascination with area magnitude and meteorology, work from that period suppressed any specificity that I deemed detracting from my perception of the grand scale and nature of this arena. Thus, the work became not only a representation of the perceptual world but also an unintentional and awkward intercession for the regional mythology of roadside romanticism - the bountiful cornucopia of the heartland, the Puritan work ethic, Manifest Destiny and others. Over the years, with considerably more time spent in the midst of working farms, I slowly began to appreciate the agrarian reality upon which much of this mythology is founded. My exploration and experience of this Midwestern rural realism is now the nature and purpose of my work today.
- George Atkinson

An affinity to the landscape is likely the result of my rural, Midwestern upbringing, with parents who gave me a deep appreciation for nature. My childhood was spent playing in pastures and exploring the woods. Summers revolved around extended camping trips across the country. It wasn't until I moved away from the Midwest that I realized its incredible beauty and the strong influence it has on my life. Upon my return, l discovered that the ground at my feet, the earth itself, is paramount to my ability to feel whole and connected. There is something reassuring and even restorative about the fact that the landscape is ever changing, yet so much the same; this particular soil, the roots, rocks, etc. have endured for decades, even centuries. My drawings and paintings are about my local surroundings. Often, they focus not so much on the vastness of the horizon, the distant vista, but on a more personal, close-up viewpoint. I want to feel as though I'm in the landscape, not as an observer but as a participant.
- Ann Coulter

I have spent most of my life in small-town Illinois. It has been good for me to live where I can see a long way in all directions and where the sky goes on forever. I would not enjoy being hemmed in by mountains, shoved up against an ocean, or surrounded by a desert. The ordered simplicity of rural Illinois has certainly been a big influence on my poetry. I cannot emphasize this too strongly. "Ordered simplicity" is what I strive for in my writing. My themes and images come from the very lifeblood of prairie Illinois. They would include the rivers, cornfields, railroads, courthouses, wildlife and wildflowers, county fairs, trees, yellow school buses, farms and farm animals, and, always, the people and the ever-changing seasons.
- Dave Etter

What surprises me, walking in some spot blessedly empty of people (that emptiness being half the reason I'm there) is how often I think of people I love - or those I'm trying to love, in spite of the usual complications. What's out there speaks to what's in here, a merging of inner and outer weather perhaps only a word truly understands, being both sound and silence, everything and nothing. West of my house, there's a huge burr oak, well over two hundred years old. Orioles nest there, weaving their hanging baskets among its thick arthritic limbs. Everything I write aspires to that architecture. From my failing, comes the poem.
- Kevin Stein

I was born in a major European city and lived there until the age of 15, when I came to this country. Though my family landed in the Midwest, we lived in urban or suburban environments. It was only after my husband and I built our house in Lake County, Illinois, near Libertyville, that my consciousness changed. On the first morning in our new home I woke up to the mooing of cows. Cows under my window, thirty-five miles northwest of Chicago! But there they were, rubbing against the fence that separated our one-acre lot from our neighbor's 200-acre estate, and they were Holsteins, the only cows I knew from vacations in the flat North German countryside of my childhood. That was my initiation, and after 40 years in this house I know what time of day it is by the way the light slants. I am intimately familiar with the names and habits of the wildflowers and the birds that live in our hawthorns and aspens. We all live together, in the world and in my poems.
- Lisel Mueller

I am often struck by how a wagon wheel, lying aslant against a barn wall, calls to mind the hack and hew of wood, the smithy's forge, the oxen and horses, and the days on end of loneliness, our forebears crossing prairie, incarnating with their eyes vast sky dropping upon them like the sea of heaven, its wrath and magnificence both unbearable and inspiring.
- Forrest Robinson

It is strange how hard it is to speak of what is most central to the poems the ground they stand on, the horizons they inhabit. The Illinois prairie its remnants in central Illinois where four feet of priceless top-soil mono-cropped and increasingly corporate owned or worse yet sold off to developers images an incredible lost fecundity natural and cultural. Images in its mysterious doubleness the people who once depended on it and those who depend on it now. Images with the miracle of flowers and grasses crowding and renewing with each change of season hope for the future, faith that there is a future. The prairie is our birthright. It is the heart of the continent as the Midwestern rivers are the great cleansing arteries. It is a hidden republic of many voices and deep roots that I try to recognize and honor in my poems.
- John Knoepfle

Having lived my early life on coal fields of deep southern Illinois and the rest of it on cultivated prairie of central and northern Illinois, I'm forever hoping to find evidence of nature untouched by humans. But when I write about nature, human beings of the past or present insist on being a part of the scene. On the prairie, the fact is magnified. Of all nature's environments, the prairie is a stage on which no curtains are drawn on the human drama. Come to think of it, even the absence of humanity in visual images of nature implies a sentient lens. And because of this, artists have a responsibility to both nature and to their fellow human beings for how they present nature. I try to meet that responsibility by recording images economically, using a language and a form sufficient only to grow poems.
- James Ballowe