Carlyle Wolfe’s The Little House series of oil on panel paintings represent a consistently focused, but visually varied exploration of Wolfe’s very poetic vision.  They draw upon her enthusiasm for nature’s vocabulary of form revealed by the artist in compositions infused with light.  If I were to select one work of particular distinction from the series, it would be #9 (24” x 40”).  It entirely sums up the virtues of her creative approach.  She uses a variety of silhouettes and linear elements taken directly from the physical world of Mississippi, layered in dense, sometimes spatially illusionistic combinations, all filtered through a true colorist’s vision.  The resulting paintings are unabashedly beautiful, yet somehow mysterious and personal, in their ode in praise of the beauty of a harmonious nature which is a bit wild and totally unspoiled by civilization.  It is an attitude not unrelated to America’s first great landscape painters active in the Hudson River area generations ago.  The spiritual allure of nature they share, but the tension between surface and illusion in her paintings and Wolfe’s very subjective color palette are very much those of a modernist artist of today.