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.
The sun is doing something faintly outrageous here: it has come in low over the water at the end of the day and parked itself exactly where her face should be, burning a hole clean through the picture. She stands at the long plank table in a floral summer dress, one hand steadying herself on the wood, and where we expect features there is only a corona of white light and a few stray rays fanning across the ceiling boards.
You could call it a failure of exposure, except that failure is plainly the point. The light has the run of the place. It flares into a small rainbow smear, glazes the empty white plates, and turns the screened porch, the wooden chairs, the trees and rocky shoreline beyond the windows into one continuous golden haze. It is the kind of light that makes people lower their voices, the last of it, generous and slightly unbearable, the way the best days end.
Harvey, who lives on the Maine coast and is widely exhibited in American museums, has made a whole body of work, the books Blue Violet and You an Orchestra a Bomb among them, out of moments like this, where domestic ordinariness gets ambushed by the sublime. The archival pigment print is the right vessel for it, able to hold that vast bright center without letting it turn to chalk, so the sunset keeps its warmth and the room keeps its wood grain, the two of them meeting in the middle of a dissolving face.
The sun is doing something faintly outrageous here: it has come in low over the water at the end of the day and parked itself exactly where her face should be, burning a hole clean through the picture. She stands at the long plank table in a floral summer dress, one hand steadying herself on the wood, and where we expect features there is only a corona of white light and a few stray rays fanning across the ceiling boards.
You could call it a failure of exposure, except that failure is plainly the point. The light has the run of the place. It flares into a small rainbow smear, glazes the empty white plates, and turns the screened porch, the wooden chairs, the trees and rocky shoreline beyond the windows into one continuous golden haze. It is the kind of light that makes people lower their voices, the last of it, generous and slightly unbearable, the way the best days end.
Harvey, who lives on the Maine coast and is widely exhibited in American museums, has made a whole body of work, the books Blue Violet and You an Orchestra a Bomb among them, out of moments like this, where domestic ordinariness gets ambushed by the sublime. The archival pigment print is the right vessel for it, able to hold that vast bright center without letting it turn to chalk, so the sunset keeps its warmth and the room keeps its wood grain, the two of them meeting in the middle of a dissolving face.