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Ann Coulter's camera is always close at hand - photographs are the landscape artist's preliminary sketches.

"For me, taking a photograph is a way to capture an instant," said Coulter, 55, while sitting in her studio at the Murray Building in Peoria recently. "Translating it into a drawing is a way of understanding what I like about it."

Coulter's pastel drawings will be displayed at Pearce Gallery in Dunlap April 30 through June 14. The artist will talk about her work at noon May 17.

Most days, as Coulter commutes to her Downtown studio from the 150-year-old Elmwood farmhouse she shares with her husband Ken, the camera is by her side, ready to capture an interesting sunset, a cloudburst visible across miles of rich brown farmland, or a thicket turned golden by the setting sun.

"I don't take the interstate. I take the back roads so I can pull over," she said.

The Midwestern landscape is endlessly interesting to Coulter, who was born and raised in Joliet and has lived in central Illinois since getting a master's in art at San Diego State University in the early 1980s.

"For me, looking at the landscape and being a part of it is sort of a grounding experience," she said. Modern society tends to be disconnected from the land in a way our ancestors could not have imagined. "It's important to be paying attention to something that isn't man-made," said Coulter. "We don't realize how much the landscape and nature affects us."

Coulter's on-site photographs are the first step of a process that is finished in the studio. Paper is tacked onto the wall and, using pastels, the artist begins disseminating the visual information in the photographs.

"I'm interested in the process of translating things," she said. "Taking a photograph is one translation, making a drawing of it is another. Things shift in every way, from the form and the light and the shape and the color, you can't have an exact replica. Those shifts are subtle, but they are significant."

For Coulter, this shift in translation has greater meaning.

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Elmwood artist Ann Coulter seeks truth in pastel art