Spring Fever

There is a moment in a garden — usually mid-morning, when the light is still cool but the day is warming — when everything seems to press forward at once. Leaves overlap leaves. Flowers crowd each other. The whole green world is quietly insisting on itself. Alexandra Bailliere has spent years learning to find that moment and hold it still on canvas, and this painting is one of her most tender and exhilarating captures of it. She came to this kind of seeing honestly: Saturday morning charcoal lessons at ten, figure drawing at eleven, and decades of close looking that eventually led her from Baltimore to the Bay Area, from Duke to UC Berkeley to Mills, and finally to the Marin coast and the gardens and roadsides that have become her true subject. In this work, the geometry of succulent rosettes anchors a composition that is otherwise gloriously unruly — yellow blooms cascade like confetti, blue-grey foliage drifts at the lower edge like sea-foam, and the pale sky above holds the whole exuberant tangle in a kind of suspension. There is joy here, but also the particular quality of attention that Bailliere brings to all her work: the sense that this corner of the garden, this ordinary and overlooked abundance, is worth the full weight of a painter's devotion. Looking at it long enough, you feel it too.