When my daughter was little, she was given a school assignment to write about her favorite place to go on vacation, and she wrote, “Ohio.” Her teacher assumed she had tried to write “Oahu,” and corrected her. My Northern California kids love the West Coast for all the reasons I do: hiking in the Sierra Nevadas, drives down Highway1, rows of vineyards in front of golden hills. Yet, they also grew up loving my home state of Ohio for all the reasons I do: softly rolling hills of corn, fields filled with lightening bugs, ice cream piled precariously high, people on front porches.

Rural Ohio is the kind of place a guy can buy a plot of land and a used fifth-wheel at auction, plant some peppers, and dry his Buckeye t-shirts and hat on a makeshift clothesline.

This was a real scene that I photographed and painted a week later. A summer day in early August: camping chairs were set up, Keystone Lights consumed and an outhouse was used.