With a laugh, Laura Lewis says of her art, “I am uncomfortable painting mountains, because they get in the way of the view.” The challenge for this High Plains realist is to create strong compositions out of the extreme horizontals that predominate her chosen artistic geography. As the works in this book will attest, Lewis excels in capturing the views discovered in her ramblings across the length and breadth of the region she has dubbed the “Great Plains of Texas.” Her paintings are a celebration of the land and the people that capture the distilled essence of a place that has formed her vision and her understanding of what it means to be at home.

Opening with a foreword by longtime columnist and Texas observer Joe Holley, At Home on the Great Plains of Texas offers images of paintings that Lewis intends as “a glass of cool water for anyone thirsting for the beauty to be found here.” The paintings are interspersed with vignettes by Christina Mulkey, a writer whom Lewis invited to accompany her on many of her “image safaris.”

收藏家、学者和历史学家早就知道并经常评论德克萨斯艺术的中心地位。凭借《德克萨斯大平原的家》中的画作，劳拉·林恩·刘易斯 (Laura Lynn Lewis) 跻身于那些教我们变革感知艺术的人行列；用马尔基的话来说，我们学习如何“参加”。在看到刘易斯祖国干旱而广阔的景色时，我们更好地理解了如何欣赏我们自己的归属感景观。