Des Moines Register
07-26-06
Clouds enlighten painter
John Preston's brushes with nature inspire an exhibit that will have viewers
looking skyward
By AMANDA PIERRE
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
It was late summer in 1979, and somewhere on the highways between Peoria,
Ill., and Fairfield, Ia., John Preston discovered what would become a lifelong
fascination.
"There was a wonderful summer storm," he said. "I had never seen lightning that
went horizontally before."
Now, like an aspiring aviator or a believer in the rapture, he spends much of his
time "with his head craned up."
The full-time painter is well-known for his sky-centric landscape paintings,
currently on view at the Olson-Larsen Galleries in West Des Moines.
Originally from outside of Baltimore, Preston had limited experience with
expansive skies until he first approached Iowa, on his way to study at Maharishi
University. He got his bachelor of fine arts degree there in 1984.
Now, the skies, clouds and weather patterns are the main subjects of his artwork.
He has been in a number of group and solo shows, and his works are in
corporate collections such as Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Hubbell Realty, Iowa
State Bank, Amoco Oil and the Hotel Pattee.
His wonderment is catchy.
"If you ever stop and watch, there's kind of a change in awareness the moment
you pick up on the motion of a cloud. You kind of think of clouds as being
arrested or static, but they are constantly rolling, tumbling and moving."
Preston's early work was mostly skies, said Marlene Olson, who has been
representing Preston since 1986.
"There was just a ribbon of land" at the bottom of his canvases, Olson said. "He
was so involved with the skies."
Over the years, aspects of the landscape have started taking over more of his
canvases, so now many are bisected with a horizon line. Vines, blades of grass,
mailboxes or stalks of corn provide the foreground that interacts with the sky
behind it. His vantage points also allow for views of farm equipment or
outbuildings.
Signs of human life are still minimal in Preston's art work. That may be because
he continually marvels at the humbling scale contrasts between man and sky.
"It's so much larger than us," he says. "I think there's that natural attraction of
bigger things."
The sky as a subject is no simple undertaking. Often clouds are depicted as
voluminous white masses, and not much else.
"I'm sort of painting what everyone else paints as background," Preston said. "It's
rather a portrait of a place, or a meteorological event, than a view of it."
Preston takes into careful consideration the density of the clouds he sees, what
he calls 'prismatics,' the light coming through, the fact that clouds are vapor, and
that their transparency gives them a dizzying range of subtle color variations.
"I really have to do unusual things for it to look believable." For instance, he often
employs glazes and paint colors that look like bile or wet cement, he said.
Like his teachers at the Maharishi University, the lapsed Transcendental
Meditator said he works a lot from memory. One might find him on the lawn of his
Queen Anne-style home outside of Fairfield, sometimes lying down in the grass,
looking up. That's how he experienced the recent, major tornados that hit Iowa
City.
"We didn't realize (we were looking at) the cell that was causing all that trouble.
Of course, we heard the news later. It's amazing how benign and beautiful those
things can seem (from a distance.) To look at this thing, it didn't look threatening
at all."
Although Preston has been gaining knowledge of the sky from all his years of
looking up, he does not study meteorology, he said.
"There's a part of me that does not want to know a lot."
For an upcoming exhibit on weather opening Aug. 21 at Iowa State University's
Brunnier Art Museum, he's creating an image of the inside of a twister, based
on observations he made at a neighbor's place that was ravaged by a tornado.
In that exhibit, he will be joined by other well-known big-sky painters such as
Ellen Wagener, formerly of De Witt, Ia., Bobbie McKibbin and Gary Bowling.
Preston's art exhibit at Olson-Larsen also includes nighttime skyscapes.