The Valley's Wild 1993

Eyvind Earle, sometime in the 20th Century, made this painting, using thin layers of paint to build up a scene of imagined wilderness. The way the paint's applied, so smooth and even, it almost looks like a print. But then you get up close, and you see the tiny details, the way the colors shift and blend, and you realize it’s all meticulously hand-painted. Look at the foreground trees. See how each one has been built up, the textures of the leaves described with such care. It’s like a kind of meditative practice, each stroke building the world. There's a rhythm in the repetition here, and it makes me think of how Agnes Martin used grids, though Earle's is a landscape, not an abstraction. Both ask us to slow down, to find a different kind of beauty, one built on careful looking. It feels timeless, like a landscape that exists more in the mind than in reality. Art, like life, is always open to interpretation, always changing.