Eden Prairie’s beautiful summer secret inspires landscape artist

Last Saturday, Minneapolis landscape artist Robert “Bob” Matheson happily agreed to pose for a photo taken by a stranger, Peggy Kvam. The Eden Prairie resident is an advocate for native habitats and serves on the board of managers for the Nine Mile Creek Watershed District. Matheson has a passion for painting swaths of urban-bound wilderness.

Both had read my July 16 Eden Prairie Local News (EPLN) story, “Summer secret: Eden Prairie’s most beautiful valley,” and liked its lead photo of Nine Mile Creek in Bryant Lake Regional Park.

Kvam and her husband, Bruce, wanted to check on the area’s restored streambank and quilts of young forbs, sedges, grasses and wildflowers, a joint watershed district and regional park project. Matheson wanted to apply his oil paints to capture the essence of the sylvan setting on canvas.

Peggy and Bruce spotted Matheson with his field easel about 3 p.m. at the side of a creek bridge near one of the parking lots for a fenced dog park. Kvam was intrigued by the artist’s take on a project she had helped review. 

Matheson is an en plein air painter – an artist who works “in the open air,” painting landscapes outdoors.

They exchanged names, and Peggy was impressed by the sunny, upbeat artist. As Matheson tells it, the three talked about the EPLN photo and his work in progress. Peggy explained the whys and hows of the creek’s makeover – the buckthorn removal and stabilization of the stream bank. Back home, she emailed her photo of Matheson and his easel to EPLN, requesting that it be forwarded to this reporter. A decade earlier, Peggy and I volunteered for some of the same community service programs, including planting native wildflowers and saplings next to a Minnetonka wetland.

I thanked Peggy for her lovely photo. Legendary Americana illustrator Norman Rockwell would have nodded and smiled at her cell phone snapshot of this mustachioed gent and his flimsy easel next to an Eden Prairie brook.

I exchanged several emails and phone calls with Matheson. From this plain-speaking, Minnesota-smart, quippy senior, I learned he’s a big fan of Nine Mile Creek. He has painted many oils of its North Branch, which begins in Hopkins, and of the full stream through Bloomington. Last Saturday was his first visit to the South Branch in Eden Prairie.

Matheson’s backstory

Matheson’s appreciation of local creeks began when he was a kid in southwest Minneapolis. Minnehaha Creek was a five-block walk up Garfield Avenue from his family’s home. He recalls seeing older kids swing over the current on a rope hung from a tree limb. Sometimes they’d let go and plop into the flow. In high school, he and his pals horsed around, as teenage boys do, in various hard-to-see stretches of Minnesota’s most famous creek.

Matheson was serving stateside in the Army as a mechanic when the United States pulled out of Vietnam. As a young, noncombat veteran, he worked various jobs before landing what would become a 20-plus-year stint driving a delivery truck for a paper products distributor.

His work shifts gave him plenty of daylight time to learn how to paint the theatrics of sun, shade, composition, color and landscape. He was encouraged by an artistic neighbor, museum visits and the Twin Cities en plein air community.

Last Saturday, Matheson returned with his fresh creek painting to the southwest Minneapolis home where he and his wife, Nancy, have lived since the early 1980s. Their address is “just a few houses off the creek” – Minnehaha Creek. He added a few more brushstrokes to what he named “A Wood Duck House Along Nine Mile Creek.”

On Sunday, Matheson returned to the same spot in the regional park. The result was a new painting titled “Nine Mile Creek South Branch View.” He likes to complete paintings in a single day.

Both are posted on his website with respectable price tags, alongside more than 200 en plein air paintings of local creeks, ponds and wetlands.

His gallery comment under “A Wood Duck House Along Nine Mile Creek” sings with praise:

“The trees were a major factor in picking this spot and the Woodie house confirmed the idea. What a great job they did with the creek, They opened it way up so you can actually see it as it meanders along. I think I can see a few more out of here.”

Matheson plans to return this fall and winter. “There’s a gnarly, twisted old tree in there that’s going to be a blast to paint once the fall colors come,” he said, also envisioning a “magical scene” when the snows come.

Matheson confided that he has been painting “like a madman for the past four years.” He had been very sick. During the pandemic, doctors cleared him for radical cystectomy surgery to remove cancerous growths on a lung, his prostate gland and bladder. They also removed 15 inches of his intestine. “Kinda like remodeling my abdomen in one day!” he said. “I had the bad parts removed in 2021 and am still here.”

The blufflands

Among Matheson’s favorite vistas to capture the interplay of light and nature is Eden Prairie’s Prairie Bluff Conservation Area. The site overlooks the Minnesota Valley – its river, bottomlands, forests and shallow lakes. Eden Prairie voters began preserving these panoramic bluffs through a 1994 bonding referendum. These days, Matheson parks his Subaru Outback in a small Indigo Drive lot tucked between Hennepin Village townhomes, grabs his gear and steps onto a paved bluff-top trail.

“That view, I’ve painted it, I don’t know how many different times,” he said. “It’s absolutely timeless.”

Westward, the trail connects to a footpath that arcs through prairie grasses to distant bluffs, with another winding down through oak savanna to Riley Creek.

He doesn’t need a muse. Not Robert Matheson. “I do the paintings, because I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do,” he said. “It’s like trying to make up for a lifetime of having to do something else.”  

Editor’s note: Jeff Strate is a founding EPLN board member. 

•  Robert Matheson will be among the Minnesota en plein air artists featured at the Douglas Flanders & Associates Gallery near 50th and France from Aug. 9 to Sept. 21.   

•  Nine Mile Creek South Fork streambank project website.

•  Nine Mile Creek Watershed District website.

•  FYI: When he was a kid, writer Jeff Strate and his pals tubed down Minnehaha Creek from France Avenue in Edina to the Xerxes Avenue bridge in Bob and Nancy Matheson’s Minneapolis neighborhood. As it turns out, Bob sold his first painting to a woman who lived in the same house the Strate family had called home in the early 1950s. It’s on Beard Avenue in Edina, just a three-minute walk to Minnehaha Creek. Back in the day, there was a Tarzan rope a bit downstream from the Beard Avenue footbridge.