Paintings of Lewis and Clark trail are on display

In this year beginning the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, many artists are imagining the adventures and the landscapes the explorers encountered as they opened the West for America. Kenneth Holder decided to paint the Lewis and Clark trail not as it was but as it is, at places crossed by bridges and flanked by metropolises and, as Holder discovered in his own explorations, at other majestic places almost unchanged.

An exhibition of 20 paintings and six sketchbooks created for Holder's Lewis and Clark Trail Project is now open at the Southeast Missouri State University Museum. Holder, a professor emeritus at Illinois State University, will come to Cape Girardeau Sept. 19 for a public reception and gallery talk. The exhibition continues through Oct. 5.

Like most Americans, Holder says, he learned very little about Lewis and Clark in school. Then he read "Undaunted Courage," Stephen Ambrose's book about the Corps of Discovery. "The book just overwhelmed me," he said. "... It's one of the greatest adventure stories I'd ever read."

From there he went back and read the explorers' journals and other books. Aside from Illinois and Missouri, he had never traveled the parts of the United States the trail passes through. With sketchbooks and cameras, he set to see the rest of the trail in 1996.

"I decided to make it my own voyage of discovery," he said in a phone interview.

His goal was to document what he saw, not only the obvious scenic and historical sites but places that were not so scenic anymore. Thus his painting of bridges at West Alton, Mo., graffiti and all, and a painting of the Omaha skyline. One painting depicts the monument built in Sioux City, Iowa, to the memory of Sgt. Charles Floyd, the only member of the Corps of Discovery to die on the journey.

Holder's 21-foot wide painting of the white cliffs at LaBarge Rock is a scene very much like Lewis and Clark would have beheld. Soon after Lewis and Clark passed through, Swiss artist Karl Bodmer painted a similar scene of the white cliffs.

The exhibition includes an essay, "Westward the Artists," by assistant museum director Eric Clements. He writes about the painters who went into the West, at first primarily as topographers, and ultimately "ingrained their monumental vision of the American West upon the wider world."

Holder is working in a tradition, but doesn't compare his own work to those artists'. "I think what they did was pretty heroic," he said. "They were pioneers as well as artists."

Many of Holder's paintings are large. "I'd paint them all that large if it were practical," he said. "There's something about the scale of the landscape that matches."

Dr. Stanley Grand, director of the museum, learned about Holder's project in a 2002 Associated Press story in the Southeast Missourian. Grand then went to visit Holder at his studio in Hayworth, Ill. There he saw the 85 paintings in acrylic, 90 watercolors and about 300 sketchbook watercolors Holder has completed for the project.

In his essay about the project that accompanies the exhibition, Grand writes that although Holder "did paint 'less attractive scenes,' he did not paint ugly pictures."

In selecting works for the exhibition, Grand wanted works that spanned the entire trail from Missouri to the Pacific Ocean. Because many of Holder's paintings are so large, Grand was restricted to paintings that would fit into the University Museum.

The largest painting in the exhibition is 21 1/2 feet wide and comes in two pieces that butt up against each other.

Grand thinks the exhibition will have broad appeal.

Holder doesn't think he's done with the project yet. "I keep thinking I've completed it, but I keep coming up with some additions to it," he said. "I've got enough images to spend the rest of my life doing it if I wanted to."

sblackwell@semissourian.com

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