KEITH JACOBSHAGEN
Gallery
Rolled Hay Northeast of Denton, oil on paper, 14”x 29.5”
“I’m a Midwesterner who has stayed put to make sense of where I live.
My interest in the land is crystallized in my paintings about it.”
-Keith Jacobshagen
By combining intimate reflections with a deep understanding and respect for nature, Keith Jacobshagen celebrates landscape in a manner reminiscent of the early Dutch masters. Through their trademark low horizons and wide, dominant skies, Jacobshagen’s paintings elicit a variety of emotions inspired by the Midwestern countryside.
At the site, Jacobshagen takes notes that include exact times and locations as well as other intangibles such as wind levels and smells. In this manner, his small works are akin to diary entries or the comprehensive landscape descriptions of a Willa Cather novel. Though Jacobshagen moves into the studio as his paintings increase in size, his work maintains the same freshness as those painted in the field. The vantage point is placed above eye level in much of his work. This perspective, along with his careful arrangement of forms on the picture plane, energizes the scene in what Art in America describes as “romantic self expression and a naturalist’s coolly objective vision.”
Raised in Wichita, Kansas, Jacobshagen graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute and received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Kansas. His work has received high acclaim throughout the United States and was featured on CBS’s “Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood.”
As a professor at the University of Nebraska, Jacobshagen has received the Outstanding Research and Creativity Award given to professors who have made extraordinary contributions to their fields. Jacobshagen’s work is featured on the cover of the Smithsonian Press/University of Iowa publication “Plain Pictures: Images of the American Prairie.”
Keith Jacobshagen’s work is in the permanent collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas city; Oakland Art Museum; Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence,KS; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; The Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE; Sioux City Art Center, Sioux City, IA; and others, including numerous public and private collections