Road to Acadia

There is a moment, driving through open country when a storm is building, when the sky turns that particular shade of dark cobalt and the fields beneath it seem to glow in response — greener than green, lit from within. Dana Christensen has lived inside that moment and painted it from memory, with a photographer's knowledge of what light does at the edge of weather. The road begins at your feet, warm and wide, the color of sun-baked earth, and it pulls you northward past fields of improbable mint into the dark hills that wait at the horizon. Christensen came to painting after years of working in historic photographic processes — platinum prints, photogravures, cyanotypes — always chasing the relationship between light and shadow, between what is present and what is about to change. That sensibility lives in every layer of this canvas. The sky is not one blue but many, built up in transparent glazes that shift as you move around the work. The fields are not flat but textured with the memory of brushstrokes, alive with green-yellow undertones that surge toward the light. The road leads somewhere just out of sight, beyond the curve of the hills, and that is entirely the point. Dana's subject has always been the natural world in all its beauty and its restlessness — the landscape as a carrier of feeling, of memory, of the particular ache of being somewhere vast and temporary. Stand with this painting long enough and you will feel the wind shift.