Doug Marx Landscape Painter Artist b. 1963
My family were pioneers settling in what is now Webster County home to Willa Cather the classmate of my great grandfather Elmer Alanso Thomas. He was the first person born on record in the county and the stockade home he was born in is on display at the Pioneer Village in Minden Nebraska. I grew up about sixteen miles south of the Platte river in the college town of Hastings, Nebraska. My parents were avid lovers of nature and weekends were always spent exploring the banks of the Platte. This was a year round activity. In winter, we trudged through the snow and looked for tracks; in spring we followed the migration of the Sandhill crane and hunted for mushroom; in summer and fall we walked the sandy bed of the river itself. By July the farmers’ irrigation pumps would reduce the Platte river to no more then a few braids of ankle deep streams, twisting their way though the sandbars and the giant driftwood trunks of cotton wood trees that had lost their grip of the river bank, succumbing to the winds of thunderstorms and erosion.
I am the youngest of three children, and by the time I was in the first grade I had broken both an arm and a leg on separate occasions. It was then I was enrolled in private art lessons and strongly encouraged by my mother and father to stay inside and spend my time drawing. An aunt had provided us with a school desk that was kept in the corner of the dining room where I would do my work. Nebraska has an abundance of exquisite sunrises and sunsets, and most evenings I would be summoned by one parent or the other to watch one with them, and to listen to their mantra of “you should paint that sunset. If I were an artist that is what I would paint”. Being a young boy, I had no interest in what they were saying. I would be preoccupied with finishing the plans of the catfish shaped submarine riverboat casino, or whatever fanciful Hollywood inspired dream I was fulfilling on paper at the moment.
By the time I was in high school I would sneak into the Art Department at Hasting College and watch slides with the art history students who were cramming for exams. It was there I fell in love with modern art and found my heros; Rothko, Dekooning, Kline, Kandinsky, O’Keeffe, Rauschenberg and others. My senior year, I graduated a semester early and planned to move to New York City to pursue my career as an artist. After many lengthy and heated conversations with my parents, a compromise was finally reached. I would stay in Hastings. They proposed in return to help me find a studio space where I’d work specifically on my art; a space I would pay for and a space I could create in that was my own. Still just seventeen I moved into my first art studio on the 3rd floor of what was then the historical Clark Hotel. I lived with my parents still but spent my days and evenings painting, drawing, sculpting; whatever served my whim.
The following fall, I attended Hastings College, where I had the opportunity to study color theory with Dr. Richard Brink. A former student of Joseph Albers, Brink opened my eyes to seeing a world in a much broader palette then I had before. Later, I attended the University of Nebraska Lincoln, where I studied composition with James Eisentrager, a devotee of Hambidge, and painting and drawing with Keith Jacobshagen. It was Jacobshagen who opened my mind to my parents long ago mantra and led me to paint the land, with which I am so familiar. So, for over twenty years now, I have painted the sunrises, the sunsets, the skies, fields, prairies and rivers that have always surrounded me and my family. I never long for what is somewhere else. Each day brings forth a new challenge to filter first through my eye, then my hand. As long as I can see and paint, I want for nothing.
