Evening Reflections

That pale disc high in the pink sky is the moon, arriving before the sun has fully gone. The sky still glows warm from sunset, while the low hills have already cooled into blue-grey bands that stack one behind another until they fade out on the right. Down at the water's edge, the marsh grass is dry and tawny, painted with quick upward flicks of a nearly dry brush, and the channel curving through it picks up the sky's colors in long horizontal streaks. Look at the small bright patch of reflected moonlight on the water, just left of center. It is the one crisp note in a painting where almost every edge has been blurred on purpose.

Carina Prigmore works in a tradition that goes back to the American Tonalists of the late 1800s, artists like George Inness and Dwight Tryon who cared less about recording a specific place than about capturing a certain hour and a certain kind of light. The trick they used, and that Prigmore uses here, is to keep the value range narrow and let color do the work: pink against blue, gold against violet, with no harsh darks to interrupt. The dark tangle of bare trees along the middle distance is the only real anchor, and even it dissolves into smudges toward the horizon. This is a wetland in late autumn or early winter, a scene most people would walk past without a second thought, which is exactly the sort of subject this kind of painting tends to favor.