Days End 1989

Eyvind Earle made this landscape with paint that looks so smooth, almost polished. I can imagine him, layering on those blues and blacks, building up a world that’s both dreamlike and precise. Look at the branches reaching out like fingers, or maybe veins, against the cool sky. He’s got this way of making everything feel so detailed, but also kind of distant, like a memory. I bet when he was painting this he was thinking about the old Chinese landscape painters with the misty mountains and gnarly trees. But Earle’s doing his own thing, giving it this totally unique, almost graphic edge. It’s like he’s saying something about how we see nature, not just what it looks like, but how it feels, all simplified and stylized. Painters are always borrowing, stealing, riffing off each other. That's the fun of it. Each of us taking what we see and turning it into something new. "Days End" feels like one artist speaking to another across time.