23. Fred Easker

About 30 years ago, I issued a simple challenge to myself: create ten landscape paintings. I had already produced lots of other kinds of work in other media so this was something very new. 

The idea came from studying the magnificent work of the 19th century Hudson River School painters and spending a lot of time commuting through the Iowa landscape. Now some 300 landscape paintings later I am still visually excited and inspired by the natural world around me. 
And still learning. Each canvas presents questions to be answered and problems to be solved: How do I present what inspires me? How do I represent the light? How do I catch the energy? Where will I get that color? 

These days I am inspired by the landscape of northeast Iowa and the remarkable, unique and beautiful Driftess Region along the Mississippi River in the northeast corner of Iowa. It is where I spend about a third of my time. The area is a very spiritual place and has a unique energy that must have been felt by the early inhabitants. They left effigies on the unique topography which was shaped by water rather than glacial action or seismic shift. It is home to hundreds of species of wildlife and is the annual migratory path of thousand of birds. Many people living there, sometimes tucked away in the coulees, are profoundly connected to the place. I feel good in the Driftless.

My work is based on photographs that I take as I travel through the landscape. Sometimes I return to a site multiple times. A photograph records an instant in time. In my studio I reconstruct the multiple photos taken at a site into a composition that becomes the principal reference for my oil paintings. While working I often refer to parts of many photographs. As I strive to interpret what I see with oil paint, my process becomes a mediation on the instant captured by the camera. 

A painting is my way of sharing my experience of that mediation. I linger, I discover and I savor the visual delights that emerge as I try to look into rather than at the images that are the basis of my work. I present them with precision and craftsmanship so that the painting can become a guide for others into the discernible and subtle wonder available in the natural world. 

Recently Fred Easker was asked to lend a painting to the United States Embassy in Vientiane, Laos through the Arts in Embassies Program of the Department of State.  It is the fourth time he has been asked to lend  work to a US embassy abroad.