“ This is my walking season, so I was able to stop by Wall Space Gallery, South 17th, Lincoln, to see landscapes by Chuck Schroeder, Taos arts community veteran, now living in Nebraska. The gallery has given me an education in the niceties of the landscape genre that thrives among artists to the West of here and in Schroeder's work, I am again surprised by a sidelong glance that suddenly picks out of the vastness a rhyme of form that clicks, and he gets it down, like a dream you have to write down fast before it vanishes. I also got to talk to Schroeder about the two worlds west of here, which remain foreign to me (except in lots of movies), ranches and rodeos. His landscapes are like little portraits of the mood of the place expressed through shape and placement of barns and the whole vis-à-vis between them and sudden gusts of wind through trees (and grass) that Schroeder has a special knack for. That sign over a dirt road is actually an entry into that other world of a ranch, commissioned for the owner.

I noted that Schroeder signs his work with a signatory ligature, which I read as the symbol of being able to make instant connections, in that one where sheep cozy up to an old car wreck and all of it tucked in under a comfortable hill, sort of thing you see in passing, then whoosh, it's gone, unless you catch it. There is one rodeo painting, but here too a real deft touch in the very difficult art of capturing movement, see his card, I had to confess never having been to a rodeo, but I’m not sure about that now, the Wisconsin state fair in the 60s might’ve had one, still fun to see art zeroed in on a world away. Lots else, but as I'm into landscape, that was my zeroing in. “