River Bend - Elsah
In the darkness of night, an evening enveloping a river I find mysteriously lovely. The beauty of night, with specificity adrift, landmarks and identities become quietly leveled in a nocturnal wonder. Yet even in darkest hours purling vastness lingers, with teeming corridors of suffused gems moored by habitation. Placidly the prism adjusts with coming of a dawn more luminous, with driftwood refugees shrouded in mists or at eventide before dusk, with a day’s swollen forms billowing over a great waterway . . . until enchantment of night again resurfaces.
For the representationally challenged painter, the great Mississippi river flowing past this unique stretch of River Bend between Alton and Hardin is never less than compelling. It makes an indelible impression---this being one of the quintessentially majestic places of the Midwest. Even while teaching bluffside along the Mississippi at Principia College’s Center for the Arts, as a painter I have rarely left this river alone for very long.
