Editor’s note: Airstream will host a fine art invitational exhibit of landscape art, May 31-June 5, at its headquarters in Jackson Center. This is one in a series of stories that will profile the artists whose work will be shown.
SIDNEY — Donald K. Lake, of rural Champaign, Illinois, has watercolor paintings in the permanent collections of museums in four states, half-a-dozen universities and major corporations from England to China and across the U.S., but ask him and he’ll say he’s a teacher first and a painter second.
Lake retired in 2008 following a decades-long career as professor of art and then professor emeritus at Parkland College in Champaign.
“I loved being a teacher. I’m proud of what my students did,” he said by phone recently. “(Parkland) was a storefront junior college when I started. I had no intention of staying. But I landed in a really, really great situation, so I stayed here for my entire career. I liked it a lot. I think I did a lot of good here.”
His teaching caused his painting to evolve into the photorealism illustrations of industrial plants and landscapes he is known for today.
“When I was in college and the first few years out of school, my whole goal was to make abstract expressionist paintings out of oil — very large, muscular, energetic things. I loved that,” he said. However, as an art professor in a community college, he found himself teaching the basics of drawing and beginning design to his students.
“I had to focus on those things and I began to reconsider some of my ideas,” he said. He also was affected by the time it took to teach and raise a family.
“It doesn’t leave very much time to (paint). So I had to figure out how to work on something piecemeal. So, this realistic work that I could build was a practical matter,” he said.
Practicality led to mastery — and recognition by the Watercolor USA Honor Society, the U.S. Department of State Art in Embassies Program, an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship Finalist Award, and publication in numerous anthologies and periodicals.
“If you’re going to be a good professor of art, you better be an artist yourself,” Lake said. “It seems easier to do with watercolor, because the way I approach watercolor is very much like a drawing, slowly building one little piece at a time. It’s easy to think of it as a drawing with watercolor.”
Despite years and years of experience, despite the awards and recognition, he still feels challenged when he faces a blank sheet of paper.
“Every time I start a painting, I think, ‘I wonder if I can do this.’ Each painting is a new challenge, full of trapdoors you can fall through. I don’t mind failing,” Lake said. How does he know if he’s failed?
“It’s a case of, if I’m sitting there on location, and I just don’t feel that what’s on the paper catches what’s there or my technique is just terrible. It’s more likely a gut feeling of knowing that this achieves what I’m seeing or it doesn’t. So I keep it in the sketchbook or I try again,” he added.
Fellow landscape artist Harold Gregor, retired distinguished professor of art from Illinois State University and a renown painter, himself, called Lake “a really great watercolorist.”
He said Lake’s artworks “get a tone to them. They’re very detailed with delicately placed color. He’s not just showing off how detailed he can get. You get a sense of the place, the temperature and the time,” Gregor said.
The two have been friends for a long time and were guest teachers in each other’s classrooms. Gregor said what Lake demonstrated to students was remarkable.
“I think (Lake) has a great visual memory. He has a whole series of industrial paintings. He has a memory for that kind of machinery.” Lake created a painting in Gregor’s classroom.
“It was remarkable what complicated stuff he would do. It sure was convincing,” Gregor said.
Often, on-location works become “notes” for studio work. Lake works from photos, painted “notes,” sketches, his memory and his imagination.
“Paintings are an amalgam of what’s in the photo and what I remember and invention,” he said. “So there are some things that didn’t really happen, but there’s a sense of believability in those places. If I present the place, the actor in this place is you, the viewer.”
As much as he enjoys painting himself, he was excited when his students got an understanding that made their own art come alive.
“I like to see people live up to beyond their expectations. I like to see the look in their eye, the light bulb going off. As a teacher, I never got tired of sharing in their success. I believe that peple succeed not because they’re smarter, but because they work harder,” he said. “Seeing my students making a living as artists — I’m very pleased with that.”
And he’s not an painter who would own a famous artwork if he could. The artist and the relationship they share is more important than the work.
“The art that I own, that I care enough about to look at, is art that I know the artist,” he said. “They are real treasures to me because I know and love these people.”
Lake and his wife thought that their retirement years would be spent in the hills of Kansas, where he grew up, but life took them in lots of other directions.
The Lakes recently took a long-anticipated trip to Italy. “The trip we’d never thought we’d take. It was spectacular,” he said. And they bought an Airstream trailer.
“That became our new muse,” he said. They travel, often with no set plans as to where they’ll go the next week or the next day. But they do know they’ll attend this year’s Alumapalooza, the reunion of Airstream owners that will take place in Jackson Center simultaneously with the Airstream Fine Art Invitational exhibit.
“I’m looking forward to meeting the other artists who are there,” Lake said. “I don’t know any of them, although I know some by reputation.” Although he has put the shiny trailer into many paintings, he will exhibit a trailer-less landscape in Jackson Center.
When he’s not painting or traveling, he’ll sit at home with a good book — William Least Heat-Moon is his favorite author — and look out the window.
“We live in the woods. (I like) looking out the glass sides of our house. We look at the birds and the animals. A little red fox comes several times a day looking for lunch. There are deer and wild turkeys,” he said.
Lake is a contented man, content with his career; content with, and still excited by, his art, content with his home and his life.
“I like just being here,” he said.
