I tell people, “My mom is from Ohio, my dad is from Hawaii,” and of course, Hawaii always wins the beauty pageant. My mom didn’t realize how affected my father had been by Ohio on their family trips until he titled some of his works after her family, and this work in particular.

If you’ve never been to Ohio in the summertime, he captures it perfectly within the piece. The landscape has unbroken miles and miles of sky and clouds, and if you’re standing on a patch of field that isn’t farmed or mowed, waist-high grass moves like the tide. There is a feeling of encroachment or oneness—a total sinking into the experience of being wind-blown and without the din of airplanes or helicopters that is unremitting in a city. My relatives lived rural-adjacent: not too far from a college town, and you could still hear the train horns blow from a distance, while the bullfrogs were just as inclined to keep you up with their bellowing. The manmade pond reflected the sky like a silver mirror, and the tadpoles would scatter at the approach of someone’s shadow. It is somehow as beautiful as Hawaii in these moments of feeling truly away from everything.

It was a culture clash for my Japanese-American father to meet my mother’s German-Irish, mainland-rooted family. My father’s reticence never allowed him to acknowledge the struggle it must have been to find his place within her family. Ohio had to have been so foreign in its unending flatness when compared to the mountain ranges on Oahu that are visible from almost every part of the island. I don’t remember him talking about Ohio to me, but the last trip we took there as a family I would see him standing at the edge of the pond with his hands in pockets, contemplating the wooden gates that kept the horses in. The animals themselves that would appear once in a while to look back at him, a stranger in a striped shirt. At 1 o’clock during summer in Ohio, the sun is an undiluted gold, and the air is hot and fragrant with everything growing.

The serenity and boundlessness of the landscape seem both precious and permanent. I can see why Dad wanted to commit this spectacular remoteness in a work of art; there is almost none of that to be found in New York. I chose this work because of its beauty and also because of its title, my father surprising me yet again with his choices. The farm in Ohio still exists, but it’s much different. The wooden posts that had been kicked in and gnawed on by the horses that clustered in the patches of grass are long gone, and the family that he met many years ago is mostly gone now, too. But looking at the painting, even if the surroundings have changed and my father is gone, I am led immediately to that moment in time, watching my dad watching the landscape, painting in his mind this work that followed.

- Misa Kobayashi