Paint a Happy Tree
by Melissa Gronlund
Dan Attoe, "You Get What You Deserve," July 7-Aug. 7, 2005, at Vilma Gold, London
In his first solo show in Britain, West Coast native Dan Attoe presented a suite of painterly landscape paintings that are suggestive both of the grand canvases of the Hudson River School and the amateurish paintings of the American West sold at malls and by mail-order. Quite neatly, this collision of the awesome and the everyday is echoed in the subject matter of Attoe’s paintings: highway strip joints set at the edge of a dark pine forest; split-level houses cowering beneath big skies; dust-covered trucks barrelling through mountain ranges.
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