Artist sees light about dusk

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Nebraska artist Keith Jacobshagen spent a year painting dusk.

About halfway through the project, he saw the dawn.

Jacobshagen, known for monumental landscape paintings of the vast, Nebraska sky, vowed to spend a year painting 365 sunsets, one for each day. Toward the end of the year, he’d fallen far behind. Three months behind, to be exact. He had to work in his studio almost nonstop to catch up, and he had to get up at 5:30 a.m. every day.

“I’ve never been a morning person,” he said.

When he’d arrive in his Lincoln studio, the sky that he’s so widely known for capturing was pitch black. He watched it through the room’s two glass walls. The light changed, and he caught the first hint of dawn.

“I was mesmerized,” he said. “It was like a narcotic.”

On the days he woke up late and missed the sunrise, he felt disappointed. The glowing morning light, it seemed, fueled his paintings of the warm evening light.

The products of Jacobshagen’s yearlong project — 365 paintings, a year’s worth of dusks — now are on display at Omaha’s Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. The exhibition, “A Golden Year,” marks an important moment in his career and his life. He wants to make one thing clear: Though he may have achieved a goal, that doesn’t mean he’s done.

Jacobshagen shared the idea for the exhibit, one he’d been pondering for more than 20 years, with Bemis Director Mark Masuoka and Bemis Curator Hesse McGraw about two years ago.

They had good reason to listen, because Jacobshagen’s career is a storied one. He’s been painting Nebraska landscapes for more than 30 years; most of his work concentrates on landscapes within 60 miles of his home in Lincoln. He’s had close to 70 solo exhibitions in galleries around the country.

But it was more than just Jacobshagen’s track record that got McGraw instantly excited. Immediately, he had the idea to install the paintings in one long chronological line around a gallery space. Each of the 365 paintings in Keith Jacobshagen’s exhibit “A Golden Year” is done on a three-and-a-half-inch by five-inch piece of bronze. They’re the same size as the notebooks he uses for sketches, journals and watercolor studies.

McGraw said his favorite part of the show is watching viewers walk through it.

“They come in this room and they have no concept of what they’re walking into,” he said.

At first, Jacobshagen said, he figured he’d simply paint every evening during the project, and at first, he did. But then things started to get in the way: The flu. Family. Dinner reservations.

“Whatever,” he said.

Instead, he began to do a quick sketch of what he saw each night. Some nights, he’d take a digital photograph. Every night, he took specific, detailed notes of what he saw in the sky. He and his wife took a trip to the East Coast and back while he was working on the project. He took notes and photographs in Omaha, Indiana, Kansas, Ohio, New York. Then, when he got home, he would go into his studio and paint, usually a whole month’s worth of dusks at a time.

“I’ve been doing this for 40-some years,” he said. “So I have a good memory bank.”

Relying on that memory — even when it was only from the day before — helped him through. Near the end of the project, he finished about five paintings a day.

The string of art installed in the Bemis gallery seems to stretch into one long horizon when approached from afar. But as the viewer walks closer, each of the 365 works takes on a distinct personality. Some are dark, others light. Some pink, others steely gray.

At first, they all look like familiar Nebraska plains. But upon further study, you can see differences. Birds swoop through the sky. Clouds take on every imaginable shape and hue. Tiny lights flicker on the horizon. In two paintings, the Manhattan skyline gently pokes out of the horizon into skies filled with pink, blue and purple.

When viewers walk through the show, McGraw said, they immediately look for the painting Jacobshagen did on their birthday, their anniversary or the day their mother died.

“Then they realize that the work is less about a set of points than it is about the totality of space. About light. About the arc of one’s own life,” McGraw said.

Jacobshagen, who recently retired from teaching at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, had that arc in mind while creating “The Golden Year.”

The 69-year-old has kept journals his whole life — he’s had whole exhibitions just based on his journaling — and saw this show as a journal of one year. His retirement finally gave him the time to do it, but his feelings were mixed.

“Retiring sometimes feels like a negative,” he said. “I don’t know what that means. I’m not going to retire. I still have curiosity.”

Jacobshagen’s most recent journal is full of vertical watercolors, with skies four times bigger than the tiny swath of land at the base. They’re familiar but new. He said they might be a clue to where he’s going next.

“I just keep painting,” he said, “and try not to think about it.”

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