Rain: Another 2.4 inches

This morning, Saturday, February 15, the sun is out but we had another couple of days of intense rain, mostly on the 13th, that added 2.40 inches to our total so far for the 2024–2025 rain year, which now stands at 36.25 inches. As 36 inches or so is the historical annual average, we've had a full year of rain now with another 10 weeks or so of potential rain ahead. 

Books I'm Reading: Susan Hall – Painting Point Reyes

Susan Hall is a painter I know from seeing her work over the years at the Erickson Gallery in Healdsburg. I've long been drawn to her abstracted landscapes of the Point Reyes area, where she's lived and painted most of her life, aside from a stint in New York as a younger woman at which time she was a friend of Mark Rothko, among others. In particular, I was taken by a distant view of cliffs overlooking a beach with pale seals basking that was dominated by a vast cerulean sky offset by the white cliffs. I loved this painting and felt a particular connection to it as I know precisely the view depicted, having been to the spot across the bay from the cliffs on birding trips. I recently dropped into the gallery and saw there a new piece by Hall in much more vivid colors than she has used in the past entitled "Deer on the Ridge." 

As the title suggests, the painting is an expansive view of a golden ridge with a few tiny deer along the ridgeline, these barely sketched in, creating a tiny accent that makes apparent the scale of the landscape they stand in. Billowing white clouds rise up behind the ridge. In the foreground, are scattered trees. Across the golden hills stretch bands of rufous and lilac that make the scene come alive. The whole is done in multiple, thin, almost transparent layers with the prominent brushwork that is typical of Hall's style. Danielle at the gallery kindly gave me a copy of Painting Point Reyes, a monograph on Hall (Green Bridge Press, 2002), which I have just finished reading. While it is mostly a selection of paintings from around 1998 to 2001, it also includes three short essays on Hall's work and her relation to the Point Reyes landscape. 

"Deer on the Ridge" and other recent work by Hall is rather more colorful than much of the work that appears in the book. Hall's earlier work used a much more limited palate dominated by ochre and olive in thin, flat washes very reminiscent of the California Tonalists, although darker. Often when looking at her work I'm reminded of the murals at the De Young Museum by Piazzoni. The way she abstracts the landscape and uses accents of intelligently chosen contrasting colors reminds me also of the Canadian painter Lawren Harris. The more recent work, with its bolder, brighter colors reminds me of Bonnard and printmaker Carol Summers. That said, Hall is immediately recognizable as Hall.