A Plateau

An antiquated wooden bed without ticking or mattress or linens, dusty, abandoned, outside.

The bed rests in between a barren field and a fertile one that rolls down toward it.

In the barren field next to the bed a rusty set of cellar doors is closed to the womb of the earth.

A small ghostly horse moves away from the bed, spiriting toward human activity on the left.

The bed interrupts, and is a placeholder for, a white picket fence.

The fence, porous, separates the right side of the painting into its own rocky landscape.

The landscape on the right holds an established tree, barren of leaves, in a wintery, pale blue-green sky.

The tree is in proximity to the bed, in reflection of it, a protection for it.

The painting’s upper landscape, an expanse of undeveloped land with a wide sky hovers like a mirage and provides a distant horizon, like the memory of a dream, bright.

A cirrus-like cloud that mirrors the solid wood canopy of the bed conjoins upper horizon with the landscape occupied by the tree.

The landscape of the lower right houses iconography of fertility— children, the margin where land meets sea, couples walking along the shore.

The long pier, attached as a thread to the scene of a woman spinning, fades into the sea while curving gently toward the cellar doors.

The woman, eternally occupied with her work, like Clotho of the Fates spinning the destinies of our lives, is sized in proportion to the bed.

She occupies her own space in front of closed metal doors unconnected to their barn, a protected emptiness, painted the blue of the sky.

A Plateau, 24” x 42”, 2009-2019, was painted in oil on glue-chalk gesso over glue size on cradled hardboard panel.