Lakeside

There is a place Dana Christensen knows well — a threshold between the open water and the sheltering grasses, where the tide has pulled back just far enough to reveal the pale, bleached reeds standing at the edge of everything. This painting holds that moment: the sky a quiet linen grey, the water a surging, swelling band of teal that carries within it every shade of the sea from bright morning green to the deep near-black of a coming squall. The reeds — rendered in collaged paper, pale and weightless — rise from the lower register of the canvas like quiet witnesses. They have stood here through many tides. There is something in their verticality, their fragile insistence, that speaks to Dana's long fascination with the natural world both beautiful and distressed. This is not a postcard landscape. It is a landscape that has weathered something and remains. Built up in transparent oil layers with the same sensitivity to light she honed through years of platinum printing and photogravure, the painting carries the quality of memory — not a single moment but an accumulation of moments at the water's edge, the kind of place you return to because it always tells you something new about the world and about yourself.