They speak nothing, yet they say a thousand words.

If you look harder, you’ll see that the collection of Nebraska and Kansas landscape paintings hanging in the Brunnier Art Museum are trying to tell you something.

They’re telling you to look beyond the common wide open spaces to notice the bright blue skies and rich greens of the Midwestern plains.

These pieces were created by well-known American landscape artists Robert Sudlow and Keith Jacobshagen, who also shared a student-teacher relationship at the University of Kansas.

Matthew DeLay, curator of education at the Brunnier Art Museum, said the exhibit is interesting because these artists who once worked together have chosen “different approaches to the same thing.”

Sudlow’s works focus on the land, where his “communion with nature” is portrayed in soft browns and various muted colors. Jacobshagen, on the other hand, uses warm pinks and oranges to help portray his image of the plains, and he uses the sky to define himself artistically.

“The paintings have to be about my life,” Sudlow said.

Jacobshagen said what you see is more than just the here and now. Instead, it’s a collection of perceptions on paper.

“I think that the sublime can be found in anything,” Jacobshagen said.

Sudlow and Jacobshagen enjoy creating landscape paintings over any other style of art because they believe it is a subject that is sometimes overlooked.

“A lot of the nation views the great plains as an inconvenience,” DeLay said. “[Sudlow and Jacobshagen] look at it as an inspiration or a source of beauty.”

Jacobshagen, who was Sudlow’s student, was born in Wichita, Kan., in 1941. He became a graphic designer and illustrator at the Kansas City Art Institute and went to work for Hallmark Cards in the contemporary design department.

In 1966, he was accepted into the masters of fine arts program at the University of Kansas, where he met Sudlow and began his landscape painting career. He paints landscapes in the field and the studio, and his pieces have been on display throughout the United States. He has had 63 one-person exhibits since 1968 in places such as New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

Jacobshagen visited the Brunnier Art Museum Sunday to talk about his career as a painter.

Sudlow was born in Holton, Kan., in 1920. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Kansas, where he also worked with Albert Bloch, who was a member of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider).

Sudlow said his goal was “to work in sympathy with an utterly mysterious cosmos,” which paralleled the spirituality and mysticism of Der Blaue Reiter.

After serving as an aviator in World War II for the U.S. Navy, Sudlow traveled to Paris, where he spent many years painting scenes of the city. Sudlow later came back to the United States to earn his masters at the California College of Arts and Sciences.

The artist returned to Lawrence, Kan., at the age of 46 to teach at the University of Kansas.

Today, Sudlow is retired at 78 years old but still paints on a daily basis. Sudlow brings his paints and canvas with him outside so he can catch his inspiration on the spot.

Sudlow paints all types of weather and believes the smells, sounds and feel of the environment enable him to give his work a more spontaneous expression of his “inner sense of place.”