On The Beat: ‘Field Studies to Paintings’ looks at the artistic process of Nebraska’s premier painter

By L. Kent Wolgamott, Lincoln Journal Star

For more than five decades, Keith Jacobshagen has packed up his sketchbooks, paints, pastels and pencils and driven the country roads around Lincoln, stopping to record views of the landscape that captured his eye.

Returning to his studios, Jacobshagen has pieced together those views, replicating some, combining others, adding elements and deleting features to create the acclaimed landscapes that made him Nebraska’s premiere painter.

“Field Studies to Paintings: 50 Years of Keith Jacobshagen,” and exhibition at Kiechel Fine Art gallery, focuses on that process, displaying more than 100 works from pages taken from the sketchbooks to completed paintings on two of its floors.

Now in his 80s, Jacobshagen has continued to take his artistic drives, even though he’s created thousands of drawings, watercolors and small paintings “in the field” over the years — more than enough to supply the raw material for a career’s worth of paintings.

“Why keep doing it?,” Jacobshagen said. “Pure pleasure, just unadulterated pleasure of being out in the countryside, in a creek bed, wherever I might have ended up that looked interesting to me.”

In a 1985 public media documentary that’s playing on a screen on Kiechel’s third floor, Jacobshagen says that he didn’t have specific destinations in mind when he headed out into the country.

But aimlessly wandering the backroads of the Platte River valley and the hills south of Lincoln gradually came to an end as Jacobshagen became familiar with the landscape and vistas.

“Eventually you collect that history in your head,” he said. “So eventually, I just knew the places I wanted to go to that would give me that kind of an encouragement, nature giving me an encouragement.”

One of those places is, so to speak, the Havelock elevator, which is seen from the same angle and with similar surrounding features in the show’s most informative pairing of works — a dark oil on paper from July 1980 and a far lighter oil on canvas with his signature cloud-crossed blue sky.

“I don’t know whether to be embarrassed by that or not,” Jacobshagen said, confessing that even today “anytime we’re out for a drive or doing anything like that and there’s an elevator in the distance. I’m staring at them thinking.“

They’re very elegant pieces of architecture that exist because they serve an absolute purpose to our human quality of food. And I’m sort of enriched by that in terms of my feelings,” he said. “So it gives me something to think about that may be more abstract than it is absolutely concrete.”

The oil on canvas is one of the exhibition’s eight paintings that are from 2023 to 2025. But the show includes paintings from as early as 1977, highlighted by a small 1992 oil-on-paper gem “From Church Road.”

Hung between some of the paintings are the field studies, often of a similar area, view or style, that have been taken from several of Jacobshagen’s sketchbooks, matted and framed.

One first floor wall contains an innovatively reframed series of works taken from a single 1986 sketchbook that retains, to a degree, their original presentation.

Hung in the middle of the frame with glass on each side, the field studies can be seen as they were in the sketchbook, with, in one example, a dark-clouded watercolor extending across two pages on the front side, a small drawing on the back.

The same wall also holds another series from a single sketchbook, this one a set of 1982 watercolors that image by image become ever more abstract, proving the notion that “realism” is essentially an abstract combination of lines and colors designed to reflect an imagined view of nature.

The third floor portion of the exhibition is devoted to showcasing the multiple media in which Jacobshagen has worked over the last 50 years.

That list of mediums extends from the oil-on-canvas and oil-on-paper — for which Jacobshagen is known — to pastels, graphite and pieces that mix oil, watercolor and graphite.

In terms of subject matter, Jacobshagen didn’t always focus on the horizon line, fields and Nebraska’s big skies when he was in the field — as drawings of a “Loon” and “Crawdad” show he could have been a top-class wildlife artist.

Also on the third floor are three examples of giclees — digital prints produced by inkjet printers — created from Jacobshagen paintings. The giclees are fine art prints and are being presented by the gallery as an affordable option to purchase.

To that end, Kiechel will be selling an unframed giclee for $90, part of gallerist Buck Kiechel’s effort to get Jacobshagen’s work out into the community where he has lived since he came to teach at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1968.

The exhibition also includes about a dozen 6×4-inch framed drawings, the smallest of the field studies, available for purchase only at the gallery that will sell for $350.

“We want to make it for beginning collectors who can’t afford a painting to be able to have a piece of Jacobshagen’s,” said Kiechel. “We won’t sell multiples of those to anyone. We want them to go to as many people as possible.”

“From Studies to Paintings: 50 Years of Keith Jacobshagen” officially opens and the sale of the small pieces begins at 5 p.m. Aug. 29. Exhibition previews can be arranged through the gallery at 1208 O St.