"This masterful work isn’t a run-of-the-mill coffee table book—it’s far more than that. The subject depicting each county might be a farm or a village or an urban scene, it might be a view of the state’s many woodlands, lakes and rivers. Put together in one collection, it’s a book that every Hoosier—as well as any lover of charming art work—will cherish." —The Courier Journal, Louisville
Painting Indiana, published in 2000 to popular acclaim and now available in paperback, represents the best work of a group of contemporary Hoosier landscape painters. It was commissioned by the Indiana Plein Air Painters Association to document the beauty of the state of Indiana at the turn of the new millennium. Each of the five artists was assigned a group of counties; all 92 counties are represented in the book. These present-day painters are inspired by the same vision as the renowned Hoosier Group, which included artists such as T. C. Steele and J. Ottis Adams, who painted Indiana at the close of the 19th and into the early part of the 20th centuries. There is great variety in these portraits of Indiana: traditional landscapes, village and urban scenes, the woodland dream, lakes and rivers, all offering a rich mixture of scenes and styles worthy of a complex and beautiful state. The artists comment briefly on their work, and Earl L. Conn provides short histories of each county.