David Hockney once said “Of course you can still paint landscape – it’s not been worn out.” There seems to be revival of this sentiment in recent years, as the pandemic created the gigantic pause that led many to reconsider the viability of the land around them, how nature was indeed lost in so many of our daily lives and how to return and see the landscape for it’s inherent beauty. And calm. The Long View, Madeleine Bialke’s beautiful series of 10 new paintings created during a two-month long residency at the Nemeth Art Center in Park Rapids in northern Minnesota, takes that reconsideration to heart and into a warm and vibrating process. These works seem to radiate with something almost meditative and beyond but of the earth. The Center notes “Some of the scenes depicted are memories from Madeleine’s childhood summers spent on her grandmother’s property in the woods around Straight River, south of Park Rapids, full of paths, ponds, dark woods, and meadows,” and there is a command of story and setting by the now London-based painter. These are the works that reverberate with a powerful calm. —Evan Pricco
