Despite refined paint handling and sophisticated technique, Michael Kessler’s paintings speak of innocence—albeit indirectly. Emerging from the 19th-century American landscape tradition, they suggest that nature may still act as the repository of the Divine. Kessler, 33 years old and urban educated, lives on a farm in the rural Pennsylvania of his birth. An isolated lifestyle has, perhaps, enabled him to bypass the apocalyptic cynicism and despair of so many of his contemporaries; however, his aspiration to a purer sensibility does not translate as naïveté. In an era when popular culture has