This painting succeeds on at least two levels. First, anyone who has read Maurice Sendak’s beloved book Where the Wild Things Are recognizes the child’s distinctive outfit, but instead of dutifully giving us Sendak’s fantastical creatures, this artist depicts highly realistic animals from the actual world striding toward us—creating an uncanny conflation of imagination and nature. Second, this artist manages to depict the landscape in a way that is simultaneously real (e.g., the tree bark is highly detailed) and abstracted (distant trees dissolve in a blaze of bright sunlight and cool shadows). None of this is easy to pull off, and the artist deserves our congratulations for bringing it all together so adeptly.

Scenes of aspen groves are commonplace in the West, but this one stands out not only for its fine drawing and coloring, but also for the canny way this artist moves us along the winding path through a deft composition. Many of the tree trunks – including the large pine’s – have been adjusted ever so slightly to drive us forward, aided by subtle contrasts in light and shadow in the foreground, middle ground, and far distance.

At first blush, the timelessness of this scene makes it seem like an Early California landscape, perhaps from the 1920s or 30s. Indeed there are parts of the Golden State that have not changed much in a hundred years, but what really makes this work stand out is the artist’s evident joy in handling pastels, using them to give us just enough visual information (without too much detail) and to help us enjoy the vista’s explosion of color and light.

This scene is not particularly autumnal in its overall coloring, but it deserves applause for the artist’s deft handling of pastels. It’s not entirely clear how all these blooms might actually have been arranged, but here the ambiguity becomes a virtue. The profusion of colors and shapes reminds us vaguely of Redon’s proto-psychedelic still lifes, glorying in beauty while calling attention to the occasionally startling angularity of some flowers (e.g., the yellow sunburst-like form at center right).