Purple Haze

Artist: Pam Haunschild

Format: Acrylic on board, black float frame

Dimensions: 11" x 14"

Description:

Distance is its own kind of subject, and Pam Haunschild built this entire piece around achieving it — layer after layer of mountain ridge receding into a pale, frost-touched sky, each range a little softer and grayer than the one before it. The palette here is restrained compared to her usual richness: dusty purples, rust, and slate blue standing in for a winter landscape that feels less like a place you'd visit and more like one you'd simply stand still and take in. A scatter of bare birch trees holds the foreground, small and exact against all that vastness. "Worked hard to get a sense of distance in this one," Haunschild says — and it shows, in a painting built entirely around the particular, icy beauty of a landscape that goes on much further than the eye can follow.