Here the artist’s eye and hand are alive to the scene before her.

All this arboreal inventiveness seems right for this juncture of the Anthropocene, an exaltation at a time when we may all be called upon to reinvent the landscape.

The paper – white, ghostly, struck through its heart, floats in space like the upturned body of an impaled fish.

Then I found John Trumbull – a stumbling American colonial painter who was also in awe of the great European painters.

Howard Hodgkin’s paintings pull me in like nature does, like those moments in my backyard did.

The marks remind me of automatic writing, as when the hand moves fast across the page and all of the sudden a thought snaps into consciousness.

He created utterly flat but paradoxically deep space, too, inhabited by dignified characters of mythical stature from scraps of colored paper, torn and ink-stained prints, bits of fabric, and parts of magazine imagery.

The land of indifference was not that far from the land of love.

In terms of thinking about how to have both a beautiful and innocent subject and not let it veer into Kleenex box pretty-ness, this painting is my guide.