Sunlight 1985

Eyvind Earle made this painting called Sunlight with, I imagine, a very fine brush. The hills roll away from us, an avocado color that’s a bit unreal, like something from a dream. I picture Earle working on this, carefully layering shades of green to give depth to the landscape. Maybe he was thinking about old Chinese landscape paintings where every detail counts. You can almost feel the sun on your face and the gentle breeze rustling through the trees. Notice those cows, like little rectangles moving through the landscape and the long shadows they cast. It’s so stylized, so perfect that you almost wonder if it’s real. I can feel him responding to the rolling landscape as well as modern trends in design, simplifying nature into clean, elegant shapes. Painters are always in conversation like that with each other, and with the world. We try to make sense of things by feeling our way through them.