Visually, what I was experiencing was profound. The Horizon Line.  I wrote in my sketchbook, "You can turn 360 degrees and see nothing. At night the whole world is sky."  From Kansas on, this line spellbound me. A line that was the division between the sky and the wide-open prairie.  The line between heaven and earth, uncluttered space, empty space with this hard, crisp line intersecting.
There was something else about this empty space with which I identified. It was the epitome of being alone. Nothing manmade, just me, the sky, that line and the earth below.  I identified with the loneliness, as deep inside I was alone with this great vista. I wanted to walk into that simplicity alone.
What I was seeing translated in to deep emotions. I saw what I, as a child, had felt. I found in the natural world a human emotion.  In the years to come, this emotion would translate into images of desolation, empty space divided by a single horizontal line. This empty space was not unlike an empty stage or a blank canvas on which my life's journey would be played out.  The tie between the visual and the emotional self would merge. I used to say that all I had to do was draw a horizontal line across a canvas and I would become inspired to paint a picture using that line as the main compositional element.
Like most artists, my early work had been greatly affected by or touched by an external factor: understandings of the visual world around me. The most important influence I discovered early in my life/work, the one component that would appear in my work time after time, over decades, was the horizon line of the Midwest. This line spoke to me on a very personal and emotional level.