Journalist and author Christopher Vondracek drove from Washington, D.C. to Omaha for one in a series of book readings throughout the Midwest. His sophomore work, “Redlin or Rodin,” is a series of essays cataloging moments from his childhood in Minnesota parallel to his adult obsession with painter Terry Redlin.
Vondracek’s parents, cousin, and wife’s aunt and uncle gathered in the corner of Bookworm Books, where he held an informal discussion of Redlin’s paintings, reading short passages from his book.
Vondracek moved from Minnesota to South Dakota to get a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s degree in literature. In 2020, he was living with his wife, Carrie, in an 800-square-foot apartment in D.C. When the pandemic shut down his favorite art galleries, he turned to the hundreds of digitized Terry Redlin paintings online.
“And that tripped a wire for me because I wouldn’t have had access to those paintings had it not been for, you know, digital culture,” Vondracek said. “The technology sort of lifted me into the space where I was all of a sudden recalling events and scenes from my childhood in the ’80s in rural Minnesota that was being wracked by, like, farm foreclosures and the schools were consolidating.”
Redlin is known for his colorful, dramatically lit paintings of Midwestern landscapes, barns and homes. They rarely feature people, but are full of songbirds, pheasants, ducks and geese. US ART Magazine’s “America’s Most Popular Artist” from 1991 to 1998, Redlin is more likely to be found on gift shop memorabilia than in galleries.
Vondracek questioned the “kitschyness” of Redlin’s artistic choices, at times resenting the idyllic pictures of landscapes that were so often stereotyped in national media and arts.
“Oftentimes when we are from like a flat place, you know, like Nebraska or southern Minnesota, eastern South Dakota, where it’s not considered beautiful, the gesture, the instinct is that we have to make fun of it,” Vondracek said. “But I also love what an oil painter does and has a sit with this place. And as Paul Groucho from southwestern Minnesota said, realizes that sublimity or grandeur can be not just high mountain heights, but it can also be like a wide horizon line, or it can be the sky.”
He said that the book was originally 90,000 words, mostly focused on Redlin, but he shortened it and focused it on his experiences at his editor’s request.