The Piper at the Gates of Dawn A MONA Moment By Ron Roth Director Museum of Nebraska Art

It is, the Shaker hymn tells us, a gift to be simple. There is beauty to be found in simple things, a fleeting image of a clatch of beehive boxes, just off the highway, luxuriating in a tender golden light, available to us for just a few brief minutes after dawn--a scene like that of Nebraska born artist Ray Knaub in his oil painting, Prairie Bees.

In this landscape, the hive boxes sit in the middle distance in a field of long grasses. Behind them, in the distance, are island groves of trees-one feathery and slightly out of focus; the other, green but fading in the haze of distance, all set against streams of pink, cloud bands layered against openings of dark blue sky.

Technically this is a landscape painting, but to my eyes, it is more a still life-a still life articulating the elegant, innate beauty of the ordinary, of the simple thing. Like a still life, its calm balance of rectangular shapes and their seemingly perfect relationships calms the spirit.

The lives relaxed angularity suggests the reassurance of formal architecture. The ochre burnished panels facing the fading sun, contrast with their panels in shadow--a perfect balance. Each beehive stack is topped by a rich umber colored brick, the bricks echoing on their surfaces the play of light and shadow on the beehive stacks below. Again, harmony, balance and the rhythm of sympathetic shapes. .

We are on the edge of sleep, our consciousness, like this image, is dissolving peacefully in the growing light of day. It is safe and serene here, a glimpse of childhood emerges. We are with Rat and Mole and the Piper at the gates of dawn, reading Wind in the Willows in the serene embrace of a sunrise.

"Sudden and magnificent, the suds broad golden disc showed itself over the horizon facing them; and the first rays, shooting across the level water-meadows, took the animals full in the eyes and dazzled them. When they were able to look once more, the Vision had vanished, and the air was full of the carol of birds that hailed the dawn .... Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, and can recapture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty of it, the beauty .... As they stared blankly, in dumb misery deepening as they slowly realized all they had seen and all they had lost, a capricious little breeze, dancing up from the surface of the water, tossed the aspens, shook the dewy roses, and blew lightly and caressingly in their faces; and with its soft touch came instant oblivion. For this is the last best gift that the kindly demi-god is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness."