Paintings

A strip of silver water running straight away from the viewer between two fields of alfalfa. Hollis called it the only straight line in the valley.

Tincup Mountain from the valley floor, the snowline drawn as one unbroken stroke. Hollis left the paper bare for the snow.

Hollis painted the Paulsen orchard every October for thirty years. In this one the light has nearly gone, and the last apples read as small warm sparks.

Layers of red and orange worked into hot wax until the surface glows from inside, like coals the morning after.

A field of cadmium red interrupted once, off center, by a pale vertical line. Ortiz-Bell painted the line last, in one breath, and would not say what it signals.

Seven greys, each a little warmer than the last, laid side by side like planks. It hung in the Harlow Savings Bank lobby for thirteen years.

The only Ekwall with a way in. The doorway is the canvas left bare; the ochre around it took him eleven coats.

Ekwall called his geometric paintings floor plans for houses he would never build. Here a black room, a red room and a grey hallway overlap, and none of them has a door.

Early and looser than the field paintings, made in one sitting from the studio window. The grey strokes are rain; the ochre mound is the haystack that would not dry.

A single line of ochre holds the dark together. Lind said it was the porch light at the Halloran farm, seen from the road.