Amanda Baldwin: Raindrops are Spheres

A field of navy evening sky. A washed-denim zigzag; the horizon of a mountain range. An ultramarine melon. An indigo cypress tree.

For Amanda Baldwin's solo exhibition, Raindrops are Spheres, the artist expands her focus from still life to landscape, finding commonalities between micro and macro in the rhythms and growth patterns of nature. Baldwin's work seeks a geometric order and reason: raindrops are spheres, mountains are triangles, melon seeds are perfect teardrop voids. Baldwin carefully renders each component discrete and knowable and yet distinctly uncanny, all washed in myriad tones of meditative and calming blue.

As she explores mathematical patterns and underpinnings to natural phenomena, Baldwin creates her own systems of growth, reducing unwieldy nature into recurring motifs. Each element toggles back and forth between representation and patterned abstraction. A palm tree's woven bark pattern morphs into a Brancusi-esque tower. A sliver of a shimmering lake through a valley becomes a harmonious inverted pyramid. A melon wears irregular stripes, but forms a perfect oval outline. Bushes and tree tops are distilled into orbs floating like atoms. Blocky zig-zags stand in for distant receding mountains.

A vase of flowers carries a plot, each bloom an actor in the chorus. Flora protrude into the scene like characters entering the stage; the canvas's edge, a proscenium. Each of these plants vibrates with charisma, each petal of a flower a character in itself.