Book leads man on quest to retrace route of Lewis and Clark

By Melissa Merli ~ The Champaign News-Gazette

HEYWORTH, Ill.

Six years ago, artist Ken Holder's wife gave him a copy of Stephen Ambrose's book, "Undaunted Courage," about the historic Lewis and Clark expedition of 200 years ago. As he read it, Holder became captivated.

"It was just amazing to me," he said. "It's one of the great adventure stories of all time in terms of courage, perseverance and venturing into the unknown."

By the following spring Holder was planning his own journey along the 3,000-mile route that Lewis and Clark followed. He had always been interested in Western history and although he had grown up in the Texas Panhandle, he had not traveled the areas that Lewis and Clark covered.

Holder decided he also would create paintings of the landscapes along the trail. First, he did research to discover whether anyone else had documented the entire trail in paintings. He could not find any at that time. So in the late summer of 1996, Holder and his wife, Jan, embarked on the first of several trips they would take along the trail between St. Louis and the Pacific Ocean.

Most of their journeys were by car, but in 1997 they took an organized weeklong boat trip on the Snake and Columbia rivers.

"It's not like a Caribbean cruise, where you sit around and eat all the time," Holder said.

Crystal clear creations

Instead, the 80-passenger vessel had a staff that included a geologist, naturalist, botanist and historian, all of whom delivered lectures much of the time. The cruise was called "An Expedition in the Wake of Lewis and Clark" but was more about nature and the surroundings, Holder said.

Holder's usual mode of working was to record his travels with his camera, taking hundreds of photographs that he later used as guides for his paintings. Still, he sometimes stopped to paint. He ended up creating about 400 watercolors and 75 acrylic paintings of the trail, working in three phases.

The first phase included more than 300 watercolors in sketchbooks. The second entailed 80 to 100 large-scale watercolors of sites the artist had found particularly interesting. In the final phase, Holder painted about 75 large acrylic paintings that range in shape and format from 1-foot squares to panoramas, diamonds, circles and more oddly shaped multicanvas paintings ranging in size up to a width of 24 feet.

About 55 of the works, the largest number from the project to be shown in one venue, are on display through April 14 at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield. Last semester, the Parkland Art Gallery exhibited about 25 of them.

Intense details revealed

One of Holder's earliest exhibitions of the Lewis and Clark paintings took place at University Galleries at Illinois State University, where he taught painting and drawing for 31 years. The emeritus professor retired about three years ago.

Barry Blinderman, director of University Galleries, called Holder's depictions of the Western landscapes "crystal-clear and hard-hitting" and said they do not succumb to nostalgia or romanticism.

"His paintings are based on direct experience, yet are filtered through veils of memory that reveal lots of striking details and intense colors," Blinderman said.

Holder, 65, began focusing on landscape painting some 20 years ago, mostly on the American Southwest including the Texas Panhandle and hill country. He is now working on a number of scenes along the Canadian River north of Amarillo for a show opening in September at the Amarillo Art Museum.