Natural Landscape 26

There is something ancient about a lone conifer on a mountainside — it has stood through snow and drought, wind and wildfire season, and it is still standing. Sue Averell has always been drawn to things that hold their ground, and in this painting she found her subject in a single tree rising above the scrubby mountain chaparral, its red trunk glowing like an ember against the cool grey-lavender of the peaks behind it. She built that tree the way the tree built itself — layer by layer, season by season — loading her palette knife with acrylic and polymer until the boughs had real weight, real shadow, real life. The sky above is the sky of the American West in the hour before something changes: clouds massing in great sculptural towers, cerulean blue holding its own beneath the white. Averell has painted skies across Thailand, the Virgin Islands, Abu Dhabi, and the Bay Area, and she knows that light — the particular quality of open space pressing down on a mountain valley. Here she captures it in the contrast between the churning, three-dimensional cloud mass and the quiet, steady green of the tree below, which seems to breathe. This is a painting about patience and presence — about the thing that stays put while everything else moves. Viewers at Gallery Sausalito have stood in front of it and gone quiet, which is its own kind of answer.