In the spring of '96, having just read Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage, I was inspired to plan my own voyage of discovery along the Lewis and Clark Trail. I had never before traveled to any of those parts of the country other than the state of Missouri. I had for several years painted landscapes of the Southwest, and I decided to make the Trail Project one of traveling Lewis and Clark's route, seeing it for myself for the first time, and attempting to record what I saw with paintings. First, I engaged a great deal of research about the subject, both historical and contemporary. I attempted to find out what other artists had endeavored to take on such a task. Numerous artists have painted parts of the Trail, notably Karl Bodmer and George Catlin, just twenty-five years after Lewis and Clark. So far as I knew then, no other painter had attempted to interpret the entire route. My goal was to picture the Trail as it appears today; including the remote locations that have changed little in the last two hundred years, like the White Cliffs in Montana, as well as the cities, bridges, and dams that were built since their exploration. The only rule that I had for myself was that I would only picture the Trail itself, and/or the landscape that could be seen directly from the Trail. I had no expectations concerning the nature of the artwork, other than to try to truthfully represent what I saw along the way.

In the summer of '96, my wife Jan and I set out along the Trail to see it for ourselves. From that start until the end of the year 2000, we continued to explore and I continued to paint.

There are three basic phases to the paintings that were made. The first Phase is made up of sketchbook watercolors, over three-hundred in number, that represent a fairly complete record of what we saw. Composing Phase II are eight larger-scale watercolors made of some of the more significant and/or interesting scenes along the way. Where the sketchbooks are straightforward, objective representations, the larger watercolors become explorations of different formats and spatial relationships derived from the landscape forms. Phase III is composed of seventy-five acrylic-on-canvas paintings, the majority of which were done after completion of the watercolors. They range in size and format from one foot squares up to panoramas, diamonds, circles, and more eccentric multiple-canvas paintings, in sizes up to twenty-four feet long. A selection from all three phases may be seen here on this website.

Several exhibitions of the Lewis and Clark Trail Project have been shown over the past three years, with several others scheduled between now and the end of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial (2004-2006). Anyone genuinely interested in Lewis and Clark Trail exhibitions and/or slide presentations, etc., may contact me at one of the listed address, or via email.

Ken Holder,
Winter 2001