Janet Krueger’s Thick and Thin exhibit opens at the Hunt Gallery Sept. 3 in San Antonio

This article is republished from Tragaluz Extra at tragaluzjournal.org

Thick and Thin, a new series of work by Encinal artist Janet Eager Krueger, opens Thursday, September 3, with a reception at the Hunt Gallery in San Antonio. Her artist talk is set for September 12 from 1 to 2 p.m. The Hunt Gallery is located at 4225 McCullough Ave.

I have known Janet for a good part of three decades. When I wrote for a newspaper in Zapata, I often relied on her for cartoons about political scoundrels. They were masterpieces in ink, perfect captures of arrogance, as were the ones she created for LareDOS.

In recent months I have visited her studio at the Krueger Ranch in Encinal, which allowed a preview of Thick and Thin, though I did not know at the time the name of this series of work. The energy in that well-lit space, the palette of the colors of the natural world committed in brush strokes to canvas as a portal to a rare moment in the monte or to the wild, untamed brilliance of South Texas sunsets casting amber, gold, magenta, and orange on the ranch lands — these were the inescapable details that registered with me about Janet, her inner sanctum, and the ethos of her artist’s heart.

We spoke by phone this evening about the details of the opening of Thick and Thin. She had just sent me an essay of the same name that she felt was a good narrative for this series of work. 

She’s a gifted wordsmith. The piece left me breathless — so much said true at so succinct a clip.

Thick and Thin

By Janet Eager Krueger

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.