From the vibrant pastels of Susan Coleman to the carefully detailed charcoal paintings of Barbara Fedeler, an array of Iowa landscapes will be on display in Pioneer Room of the Memorial Union.

The “In Distant Fields” exhibit, running through Nov. 30, will focus on the landscapes of Coleman and Fedeler, who use their different artistic abilities to portray the fields and woods of the endless Iowa landscape.

“We’re both very much interested in the big gestures of nature,” Coleman says.

Coleman grew up in southeastern Missouri in the ’60s, where she says her family would often visit forested areas. She says those early experiences eventually influenced her work.

“It was more wonderful before there were commercial enterprises,” Coleman says.

“I have this peaceful remembrance of that.”

After receiving a bachelor’s degree at Webster College in St. Louis, she moved with her husband to the University of Iowa to get her master’s degree.

There, she found a stark difference between the forested landscapes of Missouri and the open spaces of Iowa.

“The landscape [in Iowa] seems to be more about the relationship between the sky and the land,” Coleman says.

When working on her paintings, Coleman says she takes a more spontaneous response to her work rather than an analytical one.

“In looking at the landscape, I respond to it and I feel it,” Coleman says.

Fedeler received a bachelor’s degree in fine arts at Drake University and received her master’s degree at the University of Arizona.

She currently teaches at Wartburg College in Waverly and has taught at many other Iowa institutes.

Coleman and Fedeler first met as adjunct professors at the University of Northern Iowa more than ten years ago and met again when Coleman, now gallery coordinator at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, was arranging a gallery at the college in fall 2003 and thought Fedeler’s work would fit.

Later, when Coleman says she was working to get an exhibit in the Memorial Union, she says a two-person show was suggested, and Fedeler’s name came to her mind as the second person.

“It wasn’t planned, but you network with people, and sometimes the best stuff happens that way and I don’t question it,” Coleman says.

The exhibit features many of Coleman’s pastels from Iowa, as well as some of other work. Fedeler’s work features large charcoal drawings that study the varied terrain of northeastern Iowa.

“I think they make a nice contrast,” Coleman says. “When you have a contrast, you see both things better.”