Second Cutting

The second cutting arrives later in the summer, yielding the finer, softer growth the field gives up after the first harvest. It comes from ground that has already been worked, then returned to and seen again. The three painters in Second Cutting work rural ground the same way, revisiting the familiar to unearth something unseen. Plants become portraits, daily life becomes an unfolding story, and childhood landscapes become psychologically charged. Close looking reveals more than first appears.

The three painters in Second Cutting work rural ground, revisiting the familiar to unearth something unseen.

"Are not flowers the stars of earth, and are not stars the flowers of heaven?" At our first studio visit with Rachael Catharine Anderson, she spoke about this line, written in the 1830s by the English Unitarian minister William Pitt Scargill. Scargill treats the beauty of flowers as a kind of metaphysical proposition, suggesting that close observation of nature might reveal something larger than ourselves.

Anderson works en plein air in the botanically rich landscape of her Ohio childhood, where she was raised on a regenerative orchard and flower farm. Painting directly from observation, she often works at a scale that engages her whole body. The resulting paintings are intimate portraits of trees and shrubs—Dogwood, Wood Sorrel, Elderberry, Spring Beauty—that move between precise description and atmospheric dissolution. Carefully rendered forms drift into loose brushwork, allowing figuration and abstraction to coexist. She treats the canvas itself as a living ground, at times immersing it in what she calls a “primordial” bath of oil paint that gives the edges an ethereal quality. Suspended between perception and memory, her paintings leave space for the viewer to complete them.

Ryan Steadman’s paintings portray the rural rhythms of New York’s Great Western Catskills. His graphic, spare compositions depict the family, landscapes, and animals that make up his daily life. His work has a diaristic quality, offering an intimate portal into his roles as father and partner. Moving between expanses of color and passages of figurative realism, each painting reads as a moment held in suspension. With titles such as Guide, The Secret, and Under the Bridge, Steadman’s scenes hint at narratives without resolving them, inviting the viewer to finish the story.

Steadman pairs flat planes of color with built-up surfaces whose physical texture gives the paintings an almost sculptural presence. He will often rework a canvas over multiple passes, sometimes over the span of several years, until arriving at the singular image he is after. He returns repeatedly to the quotidian, revealing what sustained attention to daily life can unearth.

What a second cutting yields comes not from the first look, but from the return. The same ground, seen again, gives up something richer.

Annika Tucksmith's oil paintings draw from her rural Hudson Valley childhood while engaging the region's long tradition of landscape painting. In Amidst, crimson skies and fiery undertones crackle beneath the surface. In Rabbit Run, a swarm of rabbits follows a pied-piper-like girl, while in The Creek, a group of teenagers shares a stream with a gaggle of curious deer at twilight.

The figures carry the open-ended narrative, but the landscape is a character in its own right, built from a mix of fine detail and loose, abstract brushwork. Returning to childhood scenes, she reworks the familiar until something stranger surfaces beneath. Tucksmith's landscapes are neither wholly innocent nor wholly threatening. Instead, they occupy the uncanny space between the two, reinventing the Hudson River School's reverence for the land as a vision of childhood wonder and unease.

What a second cutting yields comes not from the first look, but from the return. The same ground, seen again, gives up something richer. Anderson returns to the botanical world of her upbringing, Steadman to the people and rhythms of daily rural life, and Tucksmith to the landscapes of childhood. In each, close observation becomes transformation, the particular opening onto the universal. These artists trust us to enter their intimate spaces, leaving room for our own memories and awe to meet theirs.