Davenport, Iowa Trip

 

I recently spent a week in Iowa. It was a fun trip after over a year of not traveling except for my exhibits. This trip mixed the personal and art parts of my life.

The impetus for the trip was to deliver two paintings to friends who purchased them a few months ago. We decided to wait until I could deliver them in person and make a little visit of it. Steve is a friend of mine from high school. Alyce is a friend of mine from college. I introduced them and was best-man at their wedding. The picture above is of a painting they previously purchased and have hanging in their living room. It was soooo nice to travel and see friends again! Thanks, Steve and Alyce for being such good friends and hosts! While in Des Moines, I also got together with my friend Mary Holmes who I know from Mallard Island on Rainy Lake. We had a wonderful lunch on a nice patio at Ceviche in downtown Des Moines. We laughed a lot, which is what happens when you get together with Mary. We talked life and Oberholtzer and art and food. Very much fun!

I took a little time out of my trip to go paint along the Mississippi River just south of Rock Island, Illinois. The painting, itself, wasn’t great but it was really enjoyable to discover a new part of this great river and to see how different it is from the section near my home in the Twin Cities.In my travels I even came across a young snapping turtle in a backwater area.

The second half of my trip was with Jeffrey Ryan, an author I am working with on a project about Ernest Oberholtzer, who was born in Davenport, Iowa. But in our travels Jeff convinced me to stop at the house where President Hoover was born and grew up. This picture is of the two room house where he was born. His dad was a blacksmith and conditions were certainly not extravagant. It was also interesting to learn that President Eisenhower tapped Hoover, despite his previous troubles as president, to lead The United States’ role in the reconstruction of Europe after World War II.

Much of my trip was spent in Davenport, Iowa taking pictures and film of the town where Ernest Oberholtzer grew up. It is a fascinating little town on the Mississippi. The pandemic has obviously been hard on the Quad Cities (Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa and Moline and Rock Island, Illinois). It seems that perhaps they were experiencing some tough times prior to the pandemic, as well. But there were some signs of life and a brighter future. The pic is looking from the river’s edge back toward downtown Davenport. In the forefront is a giant enclosed footbridge to connect downtown with the riverfront, which has a park running along it. As I drove home along the Mississippi, back to Saint Paul, I marveled at the landscape that looked so much like a Grant Wood painting. The Upper Mississippi is truly an amazing river. It is a working river, a recreational river and a beautiful river with lots of wildlife.