6:00 P.M.
A MONA Moment |
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We have seen this landscape many times in Nebraska. It is fall. It is just after sunset, about 6:00 p.m. In stillness, a flat, horizontal band of land cradles a farmstead in the far distance. The distance and the darkness blend the colors of the house, barn and landscape into a severely diminished range of colors, barely distinguishable in the long dark shadows creeping over the fields.
A spacious, insistent sky tamps down the brittle outline of the land. Rays of nuanced evening colors spread through this sky, a wide band of pink the color of dying embers rests on the horizon line. The stripped fields below support a band of horizontal lines variegated with dark dots suggesting trees, groves and buildings; small dots of white the street lights, perhaps porch lights.
The brilliance of a Keith Jacobshagen painting like 6:00 P.M. is this: When we view it from a distance, there is a start of recognition: Here is the breadth and vastness of the space we experience in the rural landscape. Its authenticity is unerring. Yet at the same time, we can get very close to the painting, and our view becomes transformed into intimacy. Here are the details of the view: a wiry smoke plume rising from a small fire, the autumn ritual of burning branches cleared from a field; a group of farm houses encircled in the embrace of the windbreak grove.
The oil painting has the quality of another medium--tempura--combining water, egg and pigment, used commonly in the paintings of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance--notable for a meticulous, brittle precision of line, invisible brushstrokes, and a limited range of colors blended with subtlety and pictorial realism.
As we view this painting the style of the northern European Renaissance comes to mind, both in technique and subject matter. The Dutch introduced to Western art the idea of the inherent beauty of landscape, the picturesque, every day views of life. Perhaps the Dutch ring of Jacobshagen is not, after all, a coincidence.
