At first glance, Julia Fish’s recent paintings read as somewhat abraded views of nature whose particularity has been slowly drained from them. What she actually accomplishes is something rather different and wonderfully complex: Fish manages to create distillations of her experiences with nature and yet provide evocative readings, reducing anecdotal description to prompt reflection on the essences just beyond the world of appearances. In its way, this is a form of quiet thunder, and the tranquility of her new work is simultaneously intense and hard-won.

Walk, 1993, seems no more than a bit of