Abigale Palmer, “Rising Green,” 60×106 in.

All important ideas must include the trees,

the mountains, and the rivers

-Mary Oliver

Abigale Palmer paints landscapes like Mary Oliver writes poetry. Her brush brings new and yet familiar ways of seeing. The paintings recognize themselves among the family of things. Staring at them echoes a forest bath. Her marks guide the eye along new thought paths, but more than the mind, the experience of seeing engages other senses. Sight, touch, spirit, and even smell play a part in the memory. Shoulders relax, time stops, and your feet root to the earth. The visual is all about immersion. Plunge into the wild: free, joyous, terrible, and full of wonder.

Palmer is a contemporary Utah painter known for vibrant, high-chroma works that transform everyday subjects and familiar Western landscapes into emotionally charged, color-driven images. She belongs to a younger generation of Utah artists working between plein-air traditions, contemporary color exploration, and narrative themes rooted in daily life—a selection of which are exhibited alongside works by Cristall Harper this month at David Ericson Fine Art.

Abigale Palmer, “Electric Prisms Vibrant,” 7.5×13 in.

Take a moment to appreciate the honesty of Palmer’s blue. Never has “true blue” held so much meaning. Let’s discard allegiance to football and ideology and instead kneel before the heavens’ pigment. Visceral, it embraces humanness and the untamed. The sapphire space captures—and now you belong to nothing but the sky.

Now immerse yourself in the mark-making, honed over years. Rolling planes intersect in determined brush strokes. Trees collide with rock in a frosting-thick palette, so unapologetically feminine. Still-life studies echo Wayne Thiebaud and portraits recall Alice Neel. You can almost imagine Joan Mitchell’s colors and marks converging into the Utah terrain. But these acts belong to Palmer.

Her landscapes thrum with life. She approaches each composition with a spontaneous eye. Movement is the brushstroke. Each mountain, sage, river, and desert sky breathes beyond the canvas. Each painting feels alive. Many artists wrestle with sedate outcomes that feel color-by-number, photographic, gimmicky, or destined for hotel lobbies. Palmer’s paint—the large, bold strokes—invites the viewer to join her vision. Whites, pastel greens, delicate oranges, and true blues clash in symphonic harmony. Palmer paints with an eye attentive to color and an embrace of the medium. She paints immersed in landscape. She forest bathes in mark-making. She personifies play. Her paint is paint.

Palmer’s paintings encompass Utah pioneers. You sense her family’s Swedish heritage as figures step into a new, dry landscape—aghast at its desert, alien plants, and unknown dangers. Yet you also feel their arrival as awe: reverence, relief, and joy. This is where they build their legacy, and Palmer witnesses, unabashedly.

Palmer is quiet, pleasant, and unassuming in person—a refreshing contrast to painters who will themselves gods. She values community, freedom, creativity, and kindness. One senses hours spent in solitude, traipsing mountain paths. The mountains are her friends. She carries ancestral heritage, wrestling with the rugged earth across generations.

Her home is an ever-changing gallery, paintings moving from studio to living room, then propped against the kitchen island. Like the mother-artist, Ruth Asawa, children weave in and out of her practice—eating snacks in the kitchen, painting and constructing beside her, running through the house, biking wildly in the backyard, dancing, wrestling, and playing pickleball on a makeshift court. Palmer’s family is handy and resourceful. They thrum with life like her wild landscapes. She is full of passion and kindness. And you feel it in her paintings. One wishes more of us might take her vision, philosophy, and goodwill to heart and put them into practice.

For how many years did I wander slowly 

through the forest. What wonder and 

glory I would have missed had I ever been

in a hurry!

Love & Renewal: Cristall Harper and Abigale Palmer, David Ericson Fine Art, Salt Lake City, through Mar. 13

Excerpts from Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way, written by Mary Oliver.

Susan Krueger-Barber

Susan Krueger-Barber occupies alter-egos to inflate, expand, and pop tension inherent in discussions of gender fluidity, urban planning, and the status quo. Krueger-Barber has produced films premiering in festivals such as Slamdance and the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, given input on the redesign of Chicago’s Milwaukee Avenue during an art residency at Corner, attended the Yale and Kenyon Writers Workshops, and been featured in Streetsblog and Strong Towns. She belongs to the cooperative Mother Art-Revisited, a collection of women re-embodying the social-political group Mother Art.