Sketches of Nebraska

Sketches of Nebraska by Hanna, Robert. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780803223288.

The sketchbook is the artists notebook, his journal, in which he records his observations in the language he knows best. Robert Hanna has spent a lifetime recording Nebraska, as it was in the past and as it remains today. The 120 sketches in this book range the length and breadth of the state, from city to village to countryside. "I have always been irresistibly drawn," he writes, "to those buildings that nobody notices--the roadside diner, the gas station, the simple neighborhood bungalow. These were the structures about which I played as a boy, and about which I stroll in my imagination today. This book is about what Nebraska means to me, one man who grew up there, and Ive tried to make it a work of reverence." The scenes included here portray the originality and vitality and strength of the states carpenters, architects, buildings stand in the shade of the wrecking crane. "Perhaps by calling attention to these magnificent and irreplaceable structures, I can help to preserve them," Hanna says. For others it is too late: "I looked at them once, scratched out my drawing, and when I looked back they had disappeared, destroyed by fire or weather or the wrecking crew. Only my sketches and the memories of local townspeople persist to substantiate the existence of many of the places youll see in these pages." A native of Ewing, Nebraska, Robert Hanna holds a degree in architecture from the University of Nebraska and has maintained an architectural practice in Lincoln since 1968. His sketches and watercolors have been exhibited throughout the state.