At first sight, Paula Kane’s paintings look like perfect Arcadian landscapes. Each features a wealth of idealised motifs so familiar to us that they are taken as natural: the rolling hills; the gnarled tree trunk; the flowing river and the hazy light… All are carefully orchestrated to such a pitch of intensity that her fabrications seem to struggle under the weight of their own perfection. Falling somewhere between Da Vinci and Disney, at any moment they could slip from the sublime into the absurd, and serve to remind us that what we hold as an ideal is often just fabrications with little relation to the real world.
