Janet Eager Krueger

ARTIST STATEMENT

Past a certain age, the concept of time flies apart at the seams. It was just yesterday just a moment ago, but it was also just yesterday when I drove the long hot highway from San Antonio to Encinal, 47 years ago. All these years I have been documenting in paint and pencil and ink the strange and beautiful world of the monte, raising cattle and children and dust – lots of dust.
Every spring the distant sound of thunder and smell of rain far away fills me with a yearning prayer of desire mixed with fear: Please, let it come here- or – if it comes here, will it rip the roof off the house? The rusty red of the soil compliments the blue gray of the cenizo, each color changing over and over again with the angle of the sun and the rushing of the wind that fills my heart with a joy and comfort that I wish I could share and explain. It is a 47-year moment that I record and share with you, in case you have not seen what I see.
To live here is a metamorphic experience, not the geologic time of riverbed mud transforming into fossil laden limestone, but an anthropomorphic merging of mind and environment, observing and feeling what seems like a slow-motion struggle taking place over the course of a human lifetime; relentless destruction and astonishing replenishment that moves through a succession of joys and sorrows, wet times and dry spells, through thick and thin, over and over again.