Tide's Out

She must have taken the photograph from above — looking down at the desert floor the way a hawk does, detached and total. The white rock ledge at the top of the canvas is a memory of water, carved smooth over centuries, bleached by a sun that shows no mercy. Below it, the earth opens in waves of amber and burnt sienna, warm and vast and indifferent. And then, there in the middle of all that open space, a single stone. White-grey, small, alone — dropped there by some older event than any of us can name. It casts its shadow, claims its place. Around it the sand swirls in dark eddies, as if the ground itself is still moving, still settling from whatever force set that stone down. Nancy Cicchetti has always said that her paintings begin with a feeling, not just an image. This one feels like scale — the humbling, clarifying kind. Standing before it, you understand how small a body is against the earth, and how strangely peaceful that can be.