A Missing Horse 2017

Mark Maggiori offers us this painting of a man, a horse, and a giant cloud in what looks like the American West. The brown of the horse and rider is echoed in the dry ground below, while above them a menacing, towering cloudscape looms. I find myself wondering what it must have been like to stand there, brush in hand, trying to capture the immensity of the sky. Was the artist trying to find a balance between the earthly and the ethereal, the grounded and the infinite? The paint seems thinly applied, yet there's a depth in the rendering of light and shadow. Look at the way the brushstrokes build up the form of that cloud – it’s a world in itself! This piece reminds me of other painters grappling with the sublime, like Frederic Church or even some of Gerhard Richter's landscapes. Artists are always in conversation with one another, aren't they? Each stroke a response to what came before, each painting a new question posed to the world.