Earnest Ochsner "The Picture Show, presenting Nebraska artists in the permanent collection of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska."

[NARRATOR] "The town of Aurora in east central Nebraska is home to artist Earnest Ochsner. From his combination home and studio atop a downtown building he has a view of the town and it's people. The walls of his home contain a retrospective of his work. Landscapes, portraits, still lifes. The work is realistic, meticulous, colorful. His painting is interpreted from photographs. He has taken thousands of stills but only a few make it to canvas."
[Earnest Ochsner] "I drive all over the state at different times and I take lots and lots of photographs and they sort of become portraits of the whole feeling of land rather than just a picture of that place, that's what they are. But they also kind of denote a whole... oh, quality about Nebraska or western Nebraska or central Nebraska or farmland. And then out of that I pick a painting and work on it and add to or take away if necessary if it doesn't work by itself. For me there's a quality that happens in the earth and the landscape that is more than just it itself. It begins talking to me. I start thinking about the way different areas relate to one another. There's a diversity. There's a lot of different things going on and so it becomes a... a whole kind of metaphysical play for my... for myself. You know, I get that personal pleasure out of it. Because I tend to think of everything I do as a portrait. They become more than... they're a picture of a person or the picture of a place or a picture of a thing but I try and find people, places and things that are more then just themselves. Maybe the... the individual, Mark Davis, is a portrait of all of the people of his generation in a way. He is... drinking... sitting and having a cup of coffee alone in a cafe, lost in introspection so to speak. Where as Warren Cass, the elderly gentleman, is all of the older retired farmers in the area. They added a great deal to the world they live in and now they're moving out. I've painted in every style of the last two hundred years at one time or another just trying to get a feel of... of this thing that I call my profession. Being an artist is... I have committed myself to it obviously. And I do it and I want to understand it and I can't understand it by not trying everything at least a little bit. Trying to get an intellectual understanding as well as an emotional understanding of what these different movements and... and styles were about. And they've lead me back to working with the world I live in directly and then letting the interpretation of that fall on the mind or the eye of the viewer."