The Tides 2021

Carrie Graber made this evocative painting, The Tides, sometime after 1975, the year of her birth, and it feels like a story unfolding, one brushstroke at a time. The palette is muted, almost sun-bleached, which gives the scene a timeless quality. Look at the texture of that rock face; Graber really gets into the nitty-gritty of its porous surface. Then there’s the contrast with the smooth, almost photographic rendering of the figure draped in fabric, each thread meticulously detailed. This tension between abstraction and realism keeps me hooked. I love the way the geometric pattern on the shawl plays against the organic forms of the rock and sea. There's something Hopper-esque about the quiet drama here, a sense of solitary contemplation. This image is not just about what we see but what we feel. Art, like the tides, keeps pulling us in, inviting endless interpretation.