Keith Jacobshagen, famed prairie painter, finds essential and eternal in endless Nebraska sky – Flatwater Free Press

Several days each week for more than 50 years, Keith Jacobshagen got behind the wheel and drove into the countryside around his home in Lincoln, to look, to experience, to think and, most importantly, to draw and paint.

“I could not stay away from going out there and being absorbed into the space and the light and the landscape,” he said. “So it was a real lure to me that was strong.”

Unlike other landscape artists who capture obvious scenic glories of crashing ocean waves or snow-crested mountains, Jacobshagen has devoted his life to depicting what much of the rest of America calls flyover country and ignores: cornfields, treelines, grain elevators and vast, unimpeded skies. 

For decades, he has been one of Nebraska’s best-known artists with works featured in scores of exhibitions across the state and the U.S. He has gained renown nationally as a chronicler of the Great Plains, with work featured in two influential museum shows that traveled the country.

“I really regard Keith as the most significant Plains or prairie painter today or then,” said the

exhibition’s curator, Joni Kinsey, “and he seemed to be doing more monumental works, and I don’t mean in terms of size but in terms of significance, that were truly in the category of sublime. His work just stood out.”