Taken from the book "Spirit of Place" by John Arthur...The plein-air, premier-coup paintings of the back roads of Nebraska by Keith Jacobshagen are remarkable evocations of place and mood. These diminutive pieces are distinguished by their painterly explicitness, expansive scale, and deep affection for the land. Typically, there are notations across the bottom describing the weather and other particulars of the moment.
Jacobshagen has described the impulse behind his landscapes in a recent letter:
Something about the road paintings- they came about as a kind of way to go home- a formal epiphany of the journey. When I was a kid in the midwest it was a tradition to go for a Sunday drive. If the day was hot, then a country drive in the late afternoon to escape the heat of Wichita was a treat. I have fond memories of those warm late afternoons with their cool shadows stretching across gravel and dirt roads- sitting in the back seat of my father's Ford looking between my parent's heads at the road that seemed to move out, cutting through the wheat of grass fields. I think the space and thrust of those roads and how they defined the slight slope and flatness of the planes- the distance of things attracted me in an intuitive way.
It is the combination of the vast open skies and distance portrayed in his paintings that attract me to Keith Jacobshagen. Although he treats the paint differently than I do, it is this general feeling of the land that I try to capture. That feeling is one of expansiveness, of solitude.
Well Kyle, I think you mighta chose him cause you like his big skies. Perhaps. . .
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