Natural Landscape 23

There is a moment in the American Southwest when the afternoon sky decides it is no longer content to stay in the background. The clouds build and surge, white and grey and impossibly tall, and the canyon below seems to answer — its ochres and siennas deepening, its shadows going purple and plum, as though the rock itself is holding its breath. Sue Averell caught that exact moment here, standing somewhere above the canyon floor, looking out at layers of geological time stacked in warm, glowing bands. For an artist who has painted the dense energy of San Francisco, the lush heat of Thailand, and the gleaming ambition of Abu Dhabi, the desert offered something different: silence with weight. Sue's impasto technique — those thick, directional strokes of acrylic and polymer that are her unmistakable signature — finds a natural partner in stratified sandstone. Each ridgeline in the paint echoes a real ridgeline in the rock. The scattered dark-green pinyon shrubs anchoring the foreground are painted with the same affectionate attention she has always given to her botanical series, tiny presences insisting on life in an ancient, indifferent landscape. Looking at this painting is to feel the scale of something larger than yourself, and also, somehow, to feel entirely at home in it. That is the gift Sue has always offered — colour and texture so joyful and so physical that the viewer doesn't just see a place, they inhabit it.