Moments to Go

Somewhere in the Marin hills north of Corte Madera, on a day when the clouds were moving fast and the light kept shifting, Nanette Biers set up her pochade box and waited for the moment. And then it came — that surge of gold across the upper hillside when a break in the clouds sends a shaft of afternoon sun racing over the grass. She painted quickly, loosely, the way she has learned to work outdoors: simplify, suggest, stay with the feeling rather than the detail. The result holds something that no photograph could quite catch — the sensation of being there, of feeling the air change and the landscape breathe. The dark tree line at the base of the hills is not just shadow; it is the cool exhalation of the valley before the warmth takes over. The clouds are not decoration; they are the engine of the whole composition, the source of both the drama and the light. Biers has always said that painting outdoors lets her see more colour than working from a photograph, and this canvas is proof: the greens alone move from teal to olive to chartreuse, held together by an instinctive sense of harmony. This is Marin as Marin feels on a luminous afternoon — generous, fleeting, and quietly extraordinary. It is a painting made from love of place, and that feeling is present in every brushmark.