Still valley 1986

Eyvind Earle made this landscape, *Still Valley*, by building up precise layers of color. Look how the tonal modulations create depth, it’s almost meditative. Earle was really interested in surface. Here, he sets up the scene with flattened forms. Take a look at the trees that line the hill. They look like stencils, and the velvety texture creates a graphic quality, like they are on the verge of floating off the picture plane. The yellow fields act like spotlights, drawing your eye in and creating an illusion of depth. The simplified shapes in this landscape remind me of some of the early Modernists like the Nabis group, who also favored flattened perspectives and decorative patterns. But where they used loose brushwork to render their subjects, Earle’s pristine surfaces are about control. Painting is always about this funny dance between accident and intention and I think Earle does a good job!