Beauty Breaks at Dawn 1996

Eyvind Earle, working at some point during the 20th century, gave us this landscape through a lens of hyper-stylization. I imagine Earle building up this vista from tiny marks, almost obsessively, losing himself in the rhythm and repetition. There's a calmness to the green hills, like gentle swells in the ocean, each one a deliberate curve. And those trees, like puffs of smoke, so dark against the misty fields. It’s easy to imagine Earle, brush in hand, thinking about fairytales as he made this. Earle was clearly in conversation with artists like Grant Wood, who found beauty in the ordinary. But unlike Wood's stark realism, Earle takes us somewhere else, into a realm of pure imagination. Painting, in his hands, becomes a doorway to a dream. And isn't that what we all want, a little escape, a break from reality?