All three paintings share the same atmospheric territory, rain moving through landscape in different registers. Seeing them together on the page, I was struck by what she saw in them. She described the work as distilling “through sensuous surfaces and an economy of magical means the intangibles of her experiences and nuanced impressions of transitory moments in the natural world. After an encounter with her piece Glimpse of Rain, watching cascade down a windowpane will cease to be the same as before.” Reading that, I felt seen in a way that is rare and difficult to describe. She understood not just what these paintings are, but what they are meant to do: to return you to the world changed, more attentive to the forces that have been moving through it all along.
Stephanie Fox Knappe is the Sanders Sosland Curator of Global Modern and Contemporary Art and Head of American Art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. The Nelson-Atkins feels, in some ways, like my hometown museum. I have been visiting since college, when I was first learning what it meant to stand in front of a painting and feel something shift. That the juror for this particular edition came from that institution felt like a quiet kind of homecoming.
There is something fitting about being included in the Midwest edition specifically. I have spent my life painting this landscape, its prairies and woodlands, its open sky, its restless weather systems. The Midwest is not incidental to my practice. It is the practice. Being seen within that context, by a juror from an institution I have loved since college, felt like the right kind of recognition in the right kind of place.