Now into my seventh month as the director of the Cedarburg Cultural Center, I can unequivocally state one thing: You can tell a lot about what’s in an artist’s head by what’s on his canvas.

Today, I am surrounded with beauty in our galleries. It is my first Plein Air experience, and everywhere I look, I see warmth and light and “fecundity” (love that word) spilling forth from the paint brushes of our winter-weary artists and igniting canvas after lush canvas. The Plein Air Painting Competition painters, in complete defiance of Mother Nature’s statements to the contrary, have decided that summer has arrived.  

And then there are the fresh artists of the Plein Air Youth Division! Come visit our Harris Bank Founders’ Room where the work of 200 young artists covers the walls and reveals the joy and wonder inside the heads of these fledgling painters and crayon artistes! The grandmother of one of the youngest entrants (a curly-haired two year old) translated her entry, “She looked around and saw a red car, grabbed a red crayon, held it out in front of the car to make sure it matched, and then made a red line across the paper. Then she saw a tree, found the green crayon, held it up, and made her mark…” Perfect!

Throughout this beautiful, little city, there is great natural beauty. Artists from near and far away have captured it, each in their own way, this past week during the Plein Air Painting Competition. But I have come to believe that the greatest natural resource in this charming corner of the world is not the flora and fauna and archetypal architecture reflected in the hundreds of works of art created in the past 10 days. The greatest natural resource here is the arts community.

Per capita, we have the greatest concentration of resident artists than any other place in the Midwest. That adds up to a lot of Creative Capital, a a unique and valuable asset.  Come up with a list of other places like this. I can come up with just three. This is the Capital of Creative Capital...and the Cedarburg Cultural Center is the CENTER of it all.