Robert Sudlow's landscape paintings aspire to a quiet grandeur, one that suggests the depth of the artist's connection to his native Kansas. Taking as his subject the Flint Hills region, Sudlow challenges the viewer with seemingly prosaic, ruthlessly horizontal expanses of low-relief prairie. The perceived severity of such surroundings, however, is by no means a liability. As both critic and eulogist, Sudlow acknowledges the untraditionally spare qualities of his landscape subject while delighting in the inherent wealth of expressive potential. Sudlow explains:

"I can think of no more moving sight than sunlight through a thistlehead or pale winter grass blazing with a glory I can never paint. These extraordinary things lead me, and my canvases get tangled in roadside ditches, weeds, and brambles."

Keith Jacobshagen has found in the Nebraska prairie—a realm paradoxically described in terms of nothingness and everything; nowhere and heartland—a space for reflection. The Great Plains has been variously defined as the political, cultural, and, certainly, geographical zone of transition between the cultivated eastern American landscapes and the dramatic untamed West. Viewed by many as a kind of "inconvenience" on the way from here to there, the prairie likewise presents significant formal challenges to those artists interested in documenting the inhuman scale and grandeur of the region.

Its relative formlessness defies traditional conventions of representation; however, therein lies perhaps a greater potential for modification and expression. Ironically, what is immediately understood in Jacobshagen's work is the degree to which the definition of landscape is independent of literal depictions of the land itself. Rather than describing the prairie in terms of its actual physical expanse, Jacobshagen instead implies its immensity through explorations of the land's relationship to the ever-changing sky. By quite literally marginalizing the horizon's presence in his works, Jacobshagen thus defines the land not in terms of man's actions upon it or its potential relevance to human endeavor, but rather in terms of its vulnerability to and association with those phenomena quite beyond the terrestrial realm.

The artist's dramatic—even lyrical—canvases, while certainly based in topographical fact, nevertheless challenge the popular assumption that artists merely reproduce what they see in nature. Aiming beyond mere atmospheric accuracy, Jacobshagen embraces the abstract potential of the sky as a means of defining himself artistically; creating paintings that are as much a commentary on the act of painting itself as they are descriptions of the landscapes contained therein. Thus through the syntax of landscape, Keith Jacobshagen explores not only the elegant severity of the physical Midwest, but also suggests the presence of a metaphorical prairie—one which continues to color his perception—and thus, our experience—of this extraordinarily challenging region.

Beyond the Horizon: Sudlow and Jacobshagen was organized and toured by ExhibitsUSA. The exhibition was curated by Brian J. Bach. Tyler Museum of Art season exhibition sponsors were the Fair Foundation, Tyler Junior College, and the Watson W. Wise Foundation. Additional support was provided by the City of Tyler.