Out of Reach

Queen Anne's Lace  oil on canvas  24 x 32 1992 Peter J. Bougie

In 1992 I completed the painting Queen Anne’s Lace, named for the white wildflower shown growing prolifically in the foreground (see image). That flower did and still brings with it associations recalled from many late summer seasons. In this part of the country it first appears in July and continues to be seen in numbers well into August with stragglers still coming along in September. Summer is passing its peak; the frenzy of growth is slowing, things are maturing and going to seed, and the season is moving along on momentum generated in May and June, as it were. The daylight is already waning, and by August you begin to notice it. It’s a time of the year tinged with the feeling of things passing away, things that were longed for throughout the winter and spring; now they have either come to pass, or the opportunities have passed by.

It was a milestone painting for me. I had been striving to paint long views of the wide Mississippi valley just upstream from LaCrosse, Wisconsin, from the Minnesota side of the river, for several years. I had some success a couple of times prior to this painting but Queen Anne’s Lace was the most successful. Viewing a reproduction after 21 years I am still reasonably pleased to have done it, and there are so many things I can’t say that about. I found reasonable solutions to numerous fundamental problems associated with painting this kind of landscape that I had struggled with for a long time; spatial and atmospheric perspective across a long, expansive view, the contrast and variety of value and color intensity between foreground and background, and composing within the picture plane based on selecting from what nature provides in the way of natural patterns of light and shadow, to name three. And I hope it expresses some of the joyous, extravagant splendor of creation, and of the ordering activities of created human creatures on the landscape, evident in the agricultural fields of the middle and far distances.

On one of my trips to this site to execute the painting I took my stepson John along. I was hoping to both spend time at large in this beautiful country with him, and accomplish some painting as well. I was very preoccupied and anxious with making a name for myself as an artist; consequently I gave the painting better attention than I gave him. It is a regret I have looking back at that time; a holy opportunity that passed by. We tell ourselves there will be another chance, and sometimes there is; but even in telling ourselves there will be another chance, we acknowledge that we are passing over the one at hand.  If we receive grace now, let us not neglect it. “At the acceptable time I listened to you, and on the day of salvation I helped you. Behold, now is ‘the acceptable time’; behold, now is ‘the day of salvation.’” (Corinthians 2, 6:2). I asked for and was given much grace to complete this painting, and I asked for grace with my stepson too, in that I hoped for it. When it appeared, I did not respect it, preferring grace in the artistic form.

The painting was photographed and went to the Vern Carver Gallery (not yet Carver/Beard, as it is now) in Minneapolis. Within a few weeks it was sold to a corporation which was itself later sold.  I tried to discover what had become of the painting in the early 2000’s in order to borrow it for a Classical Realist exhibition at Hastings on Hudson in New York, but could not locate it. So it has passed, like those days, not only out of my hands but entirely beyond my reach.