Prairie Noir

cowboy the icarus oil on maple round 18" diameter 2010

above ramona oil on maple round 24" diameter 2010

baby white buffalo oil on wood14" x 14" 2009

Cowboy Majestic oil on canvas 48" x 68" 2010

bacchus oils on canvas 54" x 72"

blue lancelot oil on canvas 40" x 60" 2009

blue lancelot 2 oil on canvas 40" x 60" 2011

ramona speed trap oil on canvas 24" x 24" 2009

golden hour near moose lodge oil on canvas 12" x 12" 2010




tallgrass road oil on canvas 24" x 24" 2008

silver lining oil on canvas 12" x 12" 2010

prairie fires oils on canvas 48" x 60"
erin's sunset oil on canvas 12" x 12" 2010


hiway 60 east of 99 oil on canvas48" x60" 2010




after gerhard oil on canvas 30" x 30" 2010





osage skies oil on canvas 40" x 60" 2010

"In 1932, Jung wrote a fascinating essay on Picasso in which he connects the artist's blue paintings with the Tuat-blue of the Egyptian Underworld. He uses the word nekyia (underworld journey) for the artists' s interest in broken and fragmented images as well as his frequent portrayal of the Harlequin, which he says derives from an ancient earth deity.

The Egyptians believed in an underworld parallel to our upperworld where everyone and everything is upside down and the sky has a special underworld tint. This is a good image for where we go when our spiritual brilliance dims and we are faced with living our spirituality down within the thick textures of ordinary living. Not just an interior but a deeper world sets the stage for our spiritual progress and regress, a world that mirrors the ordinary one but is dimmer. It lies within the earth, within the earth crust in which our daily lives are lived out. On the surface it may not be visible, but to the person living in both dimensions it is seen, felt, and appreciated.

Commenting on this passage in Jung, James Hillman describes the anima or soul as a bridge between the known and the unknown. "The deeper we descend into her ontology," he writes approvingly, "the more opaque consciousness becomes." Opaque is the opposite, of course, of what most people want from their spirituality. They seek clarity and awareness. Spiritual people like crystals, not mud. But if we sought a life thick with vitality, we might not esteem clarity quite so much. We might realize that to live from fullness is to be down close to the earth where clarity is not an option, where the sky is blue but shaded. This is spirituality, too, a necessary complement to the brilliant and clarifying spirit we seek in the other direction.

The Egyptian underworld Jung mentions is a good image for deep spirituality. When the sun has set in the day world, it rises in the land of the dead, giving the underworld a blue sky and blue blush of reality. Whatever is happening in life, even in the spiritual life, has its underworld counterpart, and if we don't cultivate that bluer life, we have no way of knowing what we're doing in the light of the sun. The activities of a day may seem to be full of facts and external events, but from another point of view, one in tune with Tuat hues and tones, it may become clear that the facts and the events register as well in an underworld of meaning.

The tone of going down differs from the feeling of the ascent. As we move toward consciousness and enlightenment, we expect wholeness, integration, inspiration, and healing. Hillman uses very different words for the way of descent: dissolving, decomposing, detaching, and disintegrating. These words are not in the bright vocabulary of the new spirituality, or in much of modern psychology for that matter, and yet they offer a sometimes bitter path that completes the otherwise sentimental and partial view of the spiritual process."

Thomas Moore, The Soul's Religion

Artist Statement

Prairie Noir Series

Joseph Campbell defined the aesthetic as that which fosters reverence and the sublime as that which inspires awe. In direct personal experience there is a sort of darknessbut this should not to be confused with malign or destructive forces. The universe is a vast and overwhelming place characterized by ambiguity, mystery and seeming contradiction. Its terrifying to have ones consciousness transformed. To have unitive experiences is to have awareness that compels one to createtoward recreating such experiences.

My recognition of these states is partially why I am interested in the visual effects of pictorial layers. Veils show up over and over in my images. To see beyond the minds capacity to frame is to embrace a vast and disturbing mystery, even in the most mundane. Somehow representational images seem fuller to me when obscured by indecipherable elements floating over and around. The vague yet momentarily defined image seems more realistic and psychologically compelling than exacted physical representation. I am less interested in rendering the apparent than entering into felt complexitiestoo numerous and nuanced to contain in simple terms.

In the Prairie Noir series I focused on familiar images of Oklahoma landscapes with efforts to enter into a a more personal relationship whereby I begin to see and feel new things. My hope is that I arrive at paintings that are at once honest to the physical environs and psychologically charged. I have struggled with a good deal of emotional baggage over my return to the place of my childhood. I've been influenced by many artists, but began focusing more on Joe Andoe's work the last few years because he's from Oklahoma and because he's been able to bring paradox to all too often banal rural Oklahoma image material familiar to us all. I've also been heavily influenced by Gerhard Richter, who, among other major contemporary German artists (like Keifer and Beuys) approaches imagery with deep social concerns grounded in a romantic regard for perennial mystical values.

When I am full of self, the world is small and dingy. When I am empty and open, it can be rife with scale and mystery. Archetypally charged works of art can only come from the latter placeall the rest is artifice.

Beyond Good and Evil, Twilight and Night on the Prairie

Will Leathem

In Prairie Noir, Hogue continues his long-running inquisition of dissonance, interjecting texture and distortion between his subject and the viewer. For this series, Hogue steps away from his familiar palette to engage a new spectrum of tawny grass, earthen roads and vast reservoirs of aquamarine. This color shift establishes early on the underlying tension within the exhibit, and presages the key dichotomy of the collection...

article by Will Leathemat Art Tattler.com

npr (KWGS Tulsa) interview