Highland Summer

Most of this canvas is given over to weather. Layered ridges fade from deep blue to pale grey as they recede, and above them the sky turns milky white where the sun tries to break through the haze. The mountains are painted so thinly that they seem to be dissolving, which is exactly how distant hills behave on a humid summer morning before the air burns clear. Along the middle band, a row of trees catches enough light to show individual leaves, and then the land opens into a wide meadow flecked with yellow, rust, and tiny dabs of blue and white that read as wildflowers without ever being drawn as flowers.

Carina Prigmore is a contemporary American painter working in oil and pastel, and this piece sits comfortably in the tradition of Tonalism, the late nineteenth century approach where artists like George Inness built mood out of a narrow range of closely related colors rather than sharp detail. The trick is visible in the lower left corner, where a few thin vertical lines suggest bare saplings or old fence posts. They are the only crisp marks in the whole painting, and they give your eye something solid to hold before everything else drifts back into vapor. Highland Summer is not trying to identify a particular mountain or valley. It is more interested in the feeling of standing at the edge of a field when the horizon has gone vague.