Gilded Cliffs

Twilight settles over the sandstone bluffs in Gilded Cliffs, a 20 x 48 oil painting by Nancy Davidson, their carved, striated faces glowing soft peach and rose beneath a sky gone pastel with the last of the day's light. A lone tree perches at the cliff's edge, its silhouette a quiet counterpoint to the horizontal sweep of shoreline and still water below. Davidson captures the particular calm of this hour — when the ocean turns to glass and the whole coastline seems to exhale — in a palette so soft it borders on the ethereal.