A Handshake, Keith Jacobshagen

Exhibition Label:
"Conversation III: Connections in Place," Jun-2008

"I’m a Midwesterner who has stayed put to make sense of where I live. My interest in the land is crystallized in my paintings about it."

“In graduate school at the University of Kansas, although I was there to study illustration, I pursued painting in classes with Robert Sudlow. Bob got me to go outside and work directly from the landscape.”

“There are times when I read the paintings in the most practical way and I believe that they are simply about seeing the light falling across a space in the landscape in the late afternoon. I know that there are also times when I understand that a painting is about my relationship with my wife, the memory of a lover, memories of flying with my father when I was a kid, or conversations with various people. The paintings have to be about my life. I wouldn’t be interested in them if they were only documenting the landscape. They have to go beyond that….For me the painting is about geography and metaphor, but it is also about autobiography….”

Keith Jacobshagen

Excerpts from a Jacobshagen autobiographical statement at Kiechel Fine Art, Lincoln, Nebraska, and an interview with Melissa Rountree, 1993, Johnson County Community College Gallery of Art.

“These images by Keith Jacobshagen really capture a good idea of the weather in Kansas by showing the extremes, where you have blue sky in the same picture as the dark clouds. A thunderstorm is coming, but it may or may not pass through…I don’t think there is any doubt that anybody from Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska is going to recognize something familiar in these. To me they immediately evoke, farming, farming, farming, without a doubt. And farming that’s been taking place for a hundred years-at least a hundred years.”

Alex Sphar / Lawrence, Kansas

“For the last nine months, my primary job has been as a meteorological tower rigger. I work with a small crew of guys and we put up meteorological towers, which are 60 meters tall. Wind energy companies use the towers to collect data over a couple of years about the wind. But we have to go to the middle of nowhere most of the time, to fields with a lot wind, all over the Great Plains, but mostly in central Kansas. When you are out in the fields, the wind blows through the wheat or the tall grass and it sounds very much like you are by the ocean. The wind blows through like waves. Another interesting parallel is that the towers we put up are called ‘masts.’ So, here we are in the sea of these fields putting up these masts for the wind. These correlations of the sea and the open prairie land are some of my favorite things about the area.”

Lee Piechocki / Lawrence, Kansas / from South Bend, Indiana

The two individuals above were interviewed in downtown Lawrence, Sunday, May 18, 2008. Each person was invited to respond to images of paintings in this installation as well as to the concepts of landscape, place, and interconnectedness.