Urban Landscape 219

$9999

There is a stillness to a pueblo courtyard in the middle of the day — that particular hush when the sun is highest and the shadows go nowhere. Sue Averell has stood in that stillness, felt it accumulate in the walls, and carried it home to her Sausalito studio, where she pressed it into paint with her hands and her palette knife until the canvas held the same weight as the earth it depicts. The walls here are not flat; they are lived-in, worn, layered — just like the impasto that builds them, stroke by honest stroke. The teal window surrounds glow like cool water in the heat, and you understand why every adobe builder reached for that colour — it is relief, it is shade, it is a promise. A small clay pot sits in the courtyard dust, its cargo of dried red chilis the colour of something precious and ordinary at once, the kind of object that appears in ten thousand kitchens and means home. Above it all, Averell's sky erupts in the fat, joyful clouds she paints with the same unguarded delight she has brought to every landscape since her North Beach days — clouds that seem to know they are part of something good. This painting belongs to a long lineage of places Sue Averell has loved enough to look at hard: San Francisco fire escapes, Thai temple courts, the Bay at dusk. The Southwest pueblo joins that list — another place where human hands have shaped the earth and the light has found a way to make it luminous.

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