My wife will tell you she’s done better paintings and truthfully, some of her horses looked like gods, but “One Sunset” is my favorite. Over 10 years ago, she stood on a slope above the Pew Estate main house and looked south across the valley of the French Creek. She began outside in spring and then came back to her studio and finished it in a few weeks.
This painting is my vision of the gates of paradise, the entrance to Eden. Look at its western light on the sycamore, on the lilacs, on the maples budding in red, on the string of willows and long marsh grass. This is the eternal earth it says.
She caught the glow we might see a half-dozen times in life where the light seems to come from within the landscape, and thus, not reflections of light but objects inhabited by light. I have walked within that landscape more times than I can count.
But good paintings take us someplace other than reality, that often too common, dull arrangement of things. Her light here is what I want, it is the spirit of a place and moment for which I yearn, and maybe that is how it lifts up the spirit I must believe I carry within, even if I’ve never spoken of it.
“One Sunset” by Patti Wall
