Morning Thanks--Ed Kellogg

This is the sky yesterday just a step out of my back door. Whenever jet trails get this showy, I can't help but think something is being communicated--or else the pilots are just being goofy.

I grabbed this shot because of an artist named Ed Kellogg. Once long ago Ed Kellogg spent a semester or two at the college where I used to teach, and did utterly breath-taking work of this world--the emerald eastern edge of the Plains. He didn't just do a painting or two, he kept himself monstrously busy by doing loads of them, most of them, as I remember, landscapes. 

I grew up on Lake Michigan, so coming to the northwest corner of Iowa fifty-some years ago was all new. The terrain, the landscape (I wouldn't have known that word or thought that way when I was 18) was entirely new and interesting. Jackrabbits bounded around--I remember that (they're gone now), and the sun was no stranger--it was much cloudier on the lakefront. Outside at least, things were just plain wide open. From some spots in the country, you could see forever. It was like the lake, another place where sheer expanse makes you feel small--and that was just fine with me.

Ed Kellogg's paintings as I remember--huge canvases sometimes--made perfectly obvious that his time here was just as fascinating to him as this edge-of-the-Plains place had become to me. I'd been a resident for a while by that time, having taken a teaching job some years before. 

To say I loved his work is understatement. It wasn't love that made them so compelling to me, it was the vehemence of their testimony to his recognition that what's out there in the immediate world around me is quite amazing and, at some moments, utterly compelling. I loved how those gargantuan paintings bespoke his awe at a world so different from the world around Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where he and his family lived.

Ed Kellogg showed me how to go speechless at the world around me. That gift was a treasure. 

For years, I've taken a camera along wherever I go (a good bit easier these days with a phone). For years, I've jumped in the car or truck and just left early morning to see what I could see. Thusly, shots like this.

I've got more. Like this from outer space.

And I'm thinking, "Ed Kellogg really ought to see this."

A couple from a year ago, on a little cold trip out to the Santee Reservation in Nebraska. That's where I shot these. Stunning, isn't it?--all that azure slung in a wardrobe that seems plaid, almost Irish. 

The jet trails story goes this way. It seems impossible now, but I couldn't help think that artist Kellogg was overdoing them. "You've got jet trails in every landscape you paint," I told him. "Is there a reason?"

He looked at me with a gritty smile. "It seems they're always there."

I don't know that he's right about that, but I believe him--that they were always there when he was out in the country, measuring the beauty of a landscape he was right then beginning to envision on canvas.

I think of Ed Kellogg on mornings like yesterday, when the sky is ribboned. 

Ed Kellogg helped me to see. He did.

This morning's thanks is for occasional jet trails over a big prairie sky, and for an Artist named Ed Kellogg who helped me see.