Upstairs Room, Walpole, Maine 1962

Walker Evans made this gelatin silver print, "Upstairs Room, Walpole, Maine," and well, it's not a painting, but it's all about surfaces, right? The way light plays on things. Look at the wallpaper, how it climbs up the sloping wall, a kind of insistent pattern that flattens the space. Then there's the door, a solid plane of white, opened just so, revealing another room, another layer of pattern. It's like Evans is thinking about how we look, how our eyes move through a space, picking up details, making connections. The texture of the wood floor, the worn rug, the simple chair by the desk, all those things add up to a feeling. It reminds me a bit of Fairfield Porter, who also painted these quiet, intimate interiors, finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. It's not about grand statements but about seeing the world, one room at a time.