Bridge to Exhale

Bridge to Exhale opens onto a prairie highway running out to meet the horizon beneath a sky so vividly blue that the whole day seems to widen with it. Long cirrus streaks are swept through that blue in thinned, dragged strokes of white, feathered wet into wet so the cloud keeps its soft aliveness and appears still to be moving, while the land below lies low and generous, its fields brushed in ochre, olive, and gold with a pale ribbon of river threading the middle distance. Between them the road runs smooth and luminous, narrowing until it thins to nothing at the far edge of sight.

What a view like this does to a person is not incidental; it is built into the structure of the painting. Road and cloud converge far out at the same distant point, and the eye, following them, is made to reckon with a scale much larger than itself. The paint says as much in its making — the sky swept in long unbroken passes, the fields worked more thickly and abruptly, the difference in touch registering as air against ground. NeuroArts takes an interest in exactly this: a vista of this kind does not simply please the eye, it resets proportion, and the matters that filled the morning find their actual size.

There is a particular awe in a prairie horizon, where the land withholds nothing and the eye may travel as far as it likes, and awe has a way of making what we carry feel smaller and easier to set down.

Details

• Oil painting on canvas

• Unframed

• Ready to hang

• Dimensions in inches: 40 wide x 16 high

• Ships with tracking number via courier.