Perched on a Douglas fir in Dan Attoe’s Accretion 47 (2025), a great grey owl, calm before its nightly hunt, stares out with milky yellow eyes. In the distance, where the sun dips behind the Cascades, horizontal bands of orange and cotton-candy blue bleed together. I zoom in and out until brushstrokes become pixels, because I am in Florida and the painting is not.

Attoe’s gallerist, Andrew Reed, sent me this iPhone photo a couple of months back, after visiting Attoe’s studio in Washington State. As I am virtually diving into and out of the scene, I notice a quiet detail that I’d originally missed: another owl, tucked further back, miniscule. This one is a northern spotted owl, an indicator species in the Pacific Northwest whose presence or absence marks the overall health of old-growth forests. In 1990, the US Fish and Wildlife Service officially designated the northern spotted owl as threatened, triggering a pause in timber harvesting that drew national attention. Rural logging communities saw livelihoods on the line. Urban environmentalists cast the owl as an avatar of ecological responsibility. On primetime television, Twin Peaks comically synthesized this proxy culture war into a subplot wherein capitalist-turned-conservationist Ben Horne weaponized the endangered “pine weasel” against Washington logging baroness and former lover Catherine Martell.

Studying Accretion 47, it occurs to me that the vantage point, eye-level with a bird of the approaching night, is impossible, weird; I would be suspended, fifteen stories above the forest floor. The sometimes fantastical compositions favored by Attoe are part of the Claudean lineage, after the Baroque painter Claude Lorrain. In the 1600s, Claude collaged both observed and imagined terrains into idealized landscapes, mostly of the Roman Campagna. Exaggerated trees climb the canvas edges like theater curtains; sunlight shimmers; water bodies and rocky outcroppings hold center stage. Two centuries later, the Hudson River School sublimated Claudean staging into visions of the American West. Claude recorded his dramatizations in Liber Veritatis (c. 1635), a ledger of ink-wash drawings that catalogued each painting.

Attoe’s daily Accretion Drawings (since 2006) are a more propositional practice. These pencil sketches include ethereal, single-panel landscapes, flanked by human or nonhuman animals, scored by handwritten non sequiturs. Later, these accumulate on Attoe’s paintings, floating like computer desktop folders over a landscape. In Accretion 47, the near-hidden northern spotted owl rests not on a branch, but along the top a rectangular threshold. It is just one of Attoe’s many small windows that reveal parallel events in miniature: a colorful hot air balloon; lovers gingerly descending a grassy mountainside; a family witnessing a volcanic eruption; a nocturnal sedan, headlights aglow, barreling towards me.

Tiny figures abound across Attoe’s paintings. Claude seeded his own landscapes similarly, with Christian characters reading like marginalia, dwarfed by overwhelming natural splendor. Attoe’s are more backwoods than Biblical: a bleached blonde duo drifting through Mountain Meadow (2025); locals lining the periphery of a surreal alpine lake in Sweet Days (2025); customers settling into the waiting room in Afternoon at the Tire Store (2025).

They echo the rural, blue-collar communities that shaped Attoe. They are neighbors who labored at an Idaho nuclear facility and, later, family friends along Lake Superior’s North Shore. They are coworkers from Wisconsin window factories and Washougal walk-ins who want a heart inked onto their arm. People on the cultural fringe, Attoe has always insisted, are as worthy as anyone of a place in art history.

Frequently, Attoe slips into boondock dreaminess, a rural uncanny. Residents of Twin Peaks, Washington—Lucy Moran, Big Ed Hurley, Bobby Briggs—would be at home in his worlds, which could comfortably stage the Double R or Jack Rabbit’s Palace. Follow the show’s joke-serious pine weasel into Ghostwood National Forest, and you’ll reach Glastonbury Grove, a sycamore ring surrounding a black pool the camera frames like a Claudean set. Under certain conditions, translucent red curtains appear over the trees, a portal to the Black Lodge, ferrying us from Claude to Attoe, whose thin oil veils do similar work: one more pass and the surface goes opaque; one fewer and the weird shows through.

Fittingly, Calm on the Surface opens in late October, when the veil between worlds is said to thin. In the Pacific Northwest, daylight shortens and diffuses; fog turns the sky a misty neon gray. Down in Florida, we brace for hurricanes. As I finish this writing, Attoe’s paintings are traveling diagonally through a 3,000-mile continental membrane, en route to Andrew Reed’s gallery in Miami. Through various lenses, Florida represents an inversion of the Pacific Northwest—geographically, ecologically, and, in the imagination of the American liberal, culturally. Attoe’s Douglas firs and vertical geologies will indeed feel novel in this sun-beaten, horizontal swamp of mangroves and gators. His characters, though, should feel familiar in every corner of this sweeping American landscape.

Drive fifteen minutes beyond any metropolis and the curtains part. Everywhere is Florida. Everywhere is Twin Peaks.

-Text by Sean J. Patrick Carney

Dan Attoe: Calm on the Surface

Dan Attoe:
Calm on the Surface