Maren Hale

Maren paints people, and the places that hold them when the people are gone.

In her figure pieces the group fills the sheet. Each robe is a single transparent wash, copper or sage, umber for the deepest one, and where two figures overlap the paper glows through. They stand at different heights on two or three planes, turned toward the one white figure from more than one side, so your eye walks through the group to reach him.

In her landscapes there is almost no one. A low lake held between banks, a stony plain running out to a very low horizon, a shore at first light. One small object sits off to one side and carries the whole story. What she keeps returning to is the moment just before something happens: the reach not yet met, the arrival one step away.