It is deep midwinter in roadside America, the stretch of the season when a lake stops being water and the daylight arrives secondhand, filtered through cloud that won’t commit. Out past the dark shore, the frozen surface runs to a low tree line, and just above it the sky opens a seam of lemon and pink, the day’s one concession to glamour.
And the picture knows what it has. The tall bare tree anchors the left like a veteran who knows her angles; the rust-brown scrub on the right comes in warm, a fur trim on a grey coat; the mud and leftover snow underfoot keep things honest. Everything swims slightly, seen soft as though through a damp windshield, and the blur flatters: mauve, ivory, ash and rust settle into the kind of tonal arrangement painters once called a nocturne, moonlighting here as midafternoon. It is a mood piece that earns the mood, detail by chilled detail.
The man behind it, Ohio-born and Bay Area-based, has spent decades driving back roads in precisely this weather, photographing through the car window and numbering his pictures like tracks on an album rather than giving them titles. SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney all keep his prints, and pictures like this explain why: nobody else gets this much romance out of a frozen lake and a cloud bank. In the archival pigment print the palette holds its nerve, ash greys kept tender, that lemon-pink seam still lit at the horizon, still getting top billing, still earning it.
It is deep midwinter in roadside America, the stretch of the season when a lake stops being water and the daylight arrives secondhand, filtered through cloud that won’t commit. Out past the dark shore, the frozen surface runs to a low tree line, and just above it the sky opens a seam of lemon and pink, the day’s one concession to glamour.
And the picture knows what it has. The tall bare tree anchors the left like a veteran who knows her angles; the rust-brown scrub on the right comes in warm, a fur trim on a grey coat; the mud and leftover snow underfoot keep things honest. Everything swims slightly, seen soft as though through a damp windshield, and the blur flatters: mauve, ivory, ash and rust settle into the kind of tonal arrangement painters once called a nocturne, moonlighting here as midafternoon. It is a mood piece that earns the mood, detail by chilled detail.
The man behind it, Ohio-born and Bay Area-based, has spent decades driving back roads in precisely this weather, photographing through the car window and numbering his pictures like tracks on an album rather than giving them titles. SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney all keep his prints, and pictures like this explain why: nobody else gets this much romance out of a frozen lake and a cloud bank. In the archival pigment print the palette holds its nerve, ash greys kept tender, that lemon-pink seam still lit at the horizon, still getting top billing, still earning it.