Contributed by Lawre Stone / Known for painting interior spaces and domestic objects, Polly Shindler shifts her subject to the rural Hudson Valley landscape for her exhibition “Valley Music” at Deanna Evans Projects. Images of mountains, flowers, and fields hang in sequence on the walls, like a roll of snapshots taken from the car window. Shindler’s paintings do speak to the compulsion to pull over to the side of the road, take out the phone, and hope to capture the elusive, astonishing beauty of nature. Complementing the landscapes are larger, close-up paintings combining flower heads, stems, and leaves with abstract elements. Shindler’s flowers grow from the ground, with wispy stems and simplified blooms reaching for otherworldly skies. Painting in a full Crayola color array, she plumbs the sublimeness available every day.
Woman/Flowers is one of the largest paintings in the show and claims a wall of its own. Ball-like blossoms span the color spectrum and bob on stems of blue, violet, and green. In the background, a curvy, vertical line straddles areas of pale apricot and white, suggesting a figurative element. I’m reminded of Picasso’s paintings of Marie-Thérèse Walter, with the face in profile and rounded shoulders centered in frontal view. Two flowerless green stems complete the figure’s perimeter, delineating a woman filled with flowers. The painting’s most curious element appears at the bottom, where stems meet the earth and extends underground to a row of dots, lined up single file in a white horizontal channel. The dots progress in a sequence reminiscent of a color wheel, the paint chip display in a hardware store, or a cutaway seed diagram in a botany textbook, perhaps reflecting the growth of the larger dots into the flower heads above.
In 1790, the German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, clued by the models that botanists used in their studies, posited that merely from the form of a leaf we can infer all other aspects of the plant: root, stem, plant head, and seeds. He understood that a person possesses a “spiritual eye” that internalizes formative laws so as to discern in a plant what the physical eye cannot. Thus, we recognize plants as readily and completely as we do ourselves. This nicely explains the awe and interconnectedness we feel when experiencing nature. In line with Goethe’s insight, Shindler’s paintings, in their succinct paint handling and juxtaposition of landscape with abstract elements, evoke the unseen workings of the natural world.
Shindler also dips into early-20th-century spiritual abstraction. In Desert Flowers/Sunbathing, 19 ball-headed flowers poke out of sand-colored ground, then lean left and nod towards a cobalt blue sky. What might signify a horizon line separating land and sky undulates and swells like a wave. This ambiguity in the spatial construct throws the eye off-kilter while it invites abstract elements into the scene. Painted in a flat, chalky blue, the strange sky is inscribed with delicate chains twisting together and looping across the canvas. I see the infinity symbol, drawn in meditative repetition, representing eternity and infinite possibilities. The painting’s eccentric line and mysterious space call to mind the work of Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton.
Also apparently rooted in early 20th-century abstraction is Sky Event/Comet, a small work depicting a comet traversing the night sky. Its luminous yellow head radiates an inner brilliance against a dark, blackish sky. The comet’s tail is a wobbly cone painted with sequenced grayscale that unexpectedly ends in dull brown. The sky is studded with large gray patches, maybe cloud cover or overgrown stars. Below, the land is painted in dimly lit patches of earthy greens and blues. The muted colors, the rhythm of organic forms, and the ephemeral subject recall Arthur Dove.
Shindler is delightfully frugal, dabbing on just what’s needed for the painting to resonate. In Field of Circle Flowers, delicate flowers turn towards the sun, each brushed sparsely in a different hue, some bright and others black, maroon, or gray. In Raining Flowers, a single white, tree-like plant, centered on the canvas, spreads its limbs against a pink and lavender sky. Patches of fluorescent pink add luminosity. The plant is bizarrely out-of-scale, towering over the chiseled green hills below. I think of the tree-of-life image found in Shaker gift drawings. Like Shindler’s paintings, these tokens of love, created by visionaries, may reveal secrets of mystical worlds.
“Polly Shindler: Valley Music,” Deanna Evans Projects, 370 Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, NY. Through February 28, 2026.
About the author: Lawre Stone is an artist based near Hudson, NY. A Two Coats of Paint Resident Artist in October 2025, Stone is a 2026 recipient of the Martha Boschen Porter Grant of the Berkshire Taconic Foundation. Her work is on view in “Uprooted: Claire Sherwood & Lawre Stone,” The Teaching Gallery, Hudson Valley Community College SUNY, Troy, NY, through March 7, 2026.
