Monument Valley 1995

Curator: Welcome, I’d like to direct your attention to Eyvind Earle’s “Monument Valley” created in 1995. What are your initial thoughts? Editor: Striking. The geometry is intense but the color palette feels surprisingly calm. Makes you think you’re gazing at a landscape through a shattered kaleidoscope. Curator: That’s astute. Earle is known for simplifying complex landscapes into geometric forms, emphasizing line and shape. Consider the horizontal layering and how each color field creates spatial recession. Editor: Absolutely. It's so ordered but then the looming monolithic shapes destabilize the perspective—almost like the mesas are tilting forward to meet us. The effect is both inviting and a bit menacing. I can't look away. Curator: A testament to Earle’s skill with forced perspective and colour. It subverts conventional landscape painting—reducing natural forms to flat, stylized shapes, building a dramatic tension within the composition. Look at how he plays with positive and negative space too. Editor: Yes, the hard-edged silhouettes against the ethereal sky generate this great feeling of suspension. Like this isn’t just a painting, it’s a meditation on structure and void. This landscape is at once totally familiar and otherworldly! Curator: It’s precisely that tension that renders Earle’s landscapes so compelling, a re-imagining of the American West as geometric poetry. We hope you appreciate the nuances of this piece. Editor: The painting’s beauty and structure gave me more than I expected. Thank you for sharing.