Artist Statement: This is a group of images that show rural America looking unchanged. Driving and walking around the rural landscape, I find scenes that look just like things I remember when I was young. I do not count my youthful remembrances as the arbiter of the way things should be. But these images do strike a chord in me and I enjoy reproducing a painted version of these scenes.
And generally these particular scenes “sound” right to my eye and my memory. Cows doing what they do – heedless of the passage of time, look right to me. A heron sunning itself in my creek on a bitter cold December day. Ditto. An antique gas pump, found in a photo of a house where I remember hunting for Easter Eggs, causes me to search my memory.
The questioning continues: Who put that wreath of yellow flowers on the front porch of an abandoned church in Gethsemane, Arkansas? Why the heck is that bucket on this vacant house, which once was on a dirt road but now is sitting beside a highway?
I’m not trying to answer those questions. But I do think I’ve been able to string together a series of images from rural life all tied together by The Passage of Time.—Daniel, December 2018