Where artists get their inspiration is a topic of endless discussion, in part because it’s different in every case. For Jon Jay Cruson, who came to Eugene from Sacramento in the 1960s to attend the University of Oregon, inspiration comes from the land — but not any one landscape.  

You won’t catch him off the highway with an easel working plein air, trying to catch the light before it changes. In preparation for his exhibition Yellow Fields, on display at White Lotus Gallery until Nov. 29, he took about four trips. Each time he drove all day, leaving in the morning when it was still dark. And then he continued the drive to just past sundown. 

For Cruson, inspiration doesn’t come from any one hill, road or field. It comes from all of them. 

He’s worked this way a long time. We met last for an interview in 2017, when his landscapes leaned a bit more towards realism. There were blue skies, for example, in 2017. Now the blues are gone and yellow dominates. 

Even then, though, he explains, he sketched as he drove and his paintings were an amalgamation of different places he’d seen, not any specific scene. 

If, like him, you are someone who enjoys sunrise as much as a sunset, you know it’s just as amazing to see color come into the world as disappear. The color in all 16 paintings on view in Yellow Fields represent the fields the artist paints, which he says are always grains.   

For a year in high school back in Sacramento, working for a wheat brokerage, Cruson drove from field to field collecting grain samples and then delivering them to the broker to evaluate. Now, as an artist he drives among the fields collecting inspiration. 

His drives usually take him to the grain crops of southeastern Washington, Northern California and northeastern Oregon. For the paintings in this show, he drove mostly along the wheat fields growing south of The Dalles region of Oregon. 

While in the past he stopped and sketched, this time he didn’t sketch at all. Not even one sketch? 

“No,” he says, “I just wanted to absorb it.” 

He talks about being able to paint without being restricted to having to depict any one landscape. He is a landscape artist who is interested in conveying the experience of driving among his subject matter as much as the subject itself. In other words, the road is just as much a theme in these yellow paintings as the land it traverses.  

Each Yellow Fields painting, numbered differently, is a variation on this theme of the artist’s experience driving among the crops at harvest time when the wheat was yellow. If it were earlier in the year, he points out, then we’d be looking at green fields. 

In some of the paintings there is a dark triangular shape created by the angles of hills, as they block out parts of the road. The hills dip on the drive, says Cruson, so you can’t always see what’s ahead. 

The road works well as a metaphor for life. Just read Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” first published about 110 years ago, whose first stanza could have been written in response to Cruson’s exhibit:    

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth”

The road metaphor works for life but also for art. Cruson made no studies or preliminary sketches for these artworks. He had no idea what was coming until he began working on the final canvases. 

Painting, you can choose to wait until you’re in the moment, until you’re there, to find out what comes next. Sometimes losing sight of the road, then finding your way again. 

 White Lotus Gallery is at 767 Willamette Street, open 10 am to 4 pm, Tuesday through Saturday. Yellow Fields runs through Nov. 29.