Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph.
Art history is full of equestrian monuments, emperors in bronze on rearing chargers; here the tradition dwindles, deliciously, to a chipped white rocking horse stranded in a snowy field, ridden by a small girl in a pale pink coat. The displacement is complete: no nursery, no fireside, but open Maine winter, bare trees, flakes drifting across the dark woods like static. She leans forward and grips the wooden neck as riders have always done, and the old paint, worn to grey where other hands have held it, receives her.
What undoes my composure is small: her eyes are lowered, nearly closed, as if the ride were inward, a gallop happening somewhere snow cannot reach. Flakes have settled in her dark hair, small commas the cold keeps adding. I notice then the horse’s painted mouth, a worn red slot, mute and patient, and the single dark eye that has watched decades of such journeys. The picture is tender and slightly ominous in the same breath, the way winter dusk is; I cannot separate the sweetness from the chill, and I no longer wish to.
The photographer, English by birth and long settled on this coast, has made family life her great subject, sensory and fabular, gathered in books such as You an Orchestra a Bomb and Blue Violet and collected by American museums. In this archival pigment print the blues run deep as a held breath, the pale pink of the coat is the lone warmth, and the snow keeps falling, exactly, forever.
Art history is full of equestrian monuments, emperors in bronze on rearing chargers; here the tradition dwindles, deliciously, to a chipped white rocking horse stranded in a snowy field, ridden by a small girl in a pale pink coat. The displacement is complete: no nursery, no fireside, but open Maine winter, bare trees, flakes drifting across the dark woods like static. She leans forward and grips the wooden neck as riders have always done, and the old paint, worn to grey where other hands have held it, receives her.
What undoes my composure is small: her eyes are lowered, nearly closed, as if the ride were inward, a gallop happening somewhere snow cannot reach. Flakes have settled in her dark hair, small commas the cold keeps adding. I notice then the horse’s painted mouth, a worn red slot, mute and patient, and the single dark eye that has watched decades of such journeys. The picture is tender and slightly ominous in the same breath, the way winter dusk is; I cannot separate the sweetness from the chill, and I no longer wish to.
The photographer, English by birth and long settled on this coast, has made family life her great subject, sensory and fabular, gathered in books such as You an Orchestra a Bomb and Blue Violet and collected by American museums. In this archival pigment print the blues run deep as a held breath, the pale pink of the coat is the lone warmth, and the snow keeps falling, exactly, forever.