Sand Storm, 1932

Carrie Moyer: My name is Carrie Moyer, and I'm a painter.

I'm really interested in how symmetry operates, which is one of the principles that she often goes back to in the paintings. And obviously, it goes to religious art, from Christian altarpieces to the mandala. And she uses it here as something that speaks to us about a kind of curtain that we can look through. That's a device she uses a lot.

This one is called Sand Storm. It’s a lot of this weird, muddy brown and a kind of glowing light that one can imagine coming through something that we think of as a sand storm. So there's a contradictory relationship between the palette and the title, and presumably what the subject of the painting is.

I was very interested in how Pelton had internalized Art Deco and a lot of popular culture ways of looking at nature. And we can think about Walt Disney and certain kinds of cartooning, but this idea that nature is this kind of benevolent force and sort of magical. It's very different from how nature was depicted by European artists in the nineteenth century, which is when she was born.