Misty Summer Morning

A shallow pool of water sits in the middle of a summer meadow, catching just enough light to read as pale silver against the green. Behind it, a ragged line of trees blurs where their tops meet the air, and beyond that the hills stack up in layers of blue that grow fainter as they recede. Carina Prigmore has let the mist do most of the work here: it erases the edges of everything more than a few hundred feet away, so the ridges read less as solid land and more as bands of color laid one over another.

Prigmore is a contemporary American painter who works in this atmospheric vein, closer to the Tonalists of the late nineteenth century than to anything sharp-edged or modern. Those artists, George Inness among them, believed weather and light mattered more than accurate topography, and paintings like this one follow the same logic. The grass in the foreground is the only place where the brush gets busy, with thin upright strokes of ochre and olive scratched over the green to suggest seed heads. Her signature sits low on the right in loose cursive, small enough that most people walk past it.