$20,000

In interviews over the years, Dorland has discussed his maturation as an artist. He knew he was finding his way, he said, when his work began to contain the right amount of abstraction. His material sense came later, but finding ways to allow the recognizable world to remain so, while letting it also dissociate into moods and sensations was paramount. Many of his forest scenes from 2009 are almost nonrepresentational – the blue-green conifers are splays of lines, sinister somehow – but Sunset is right on the edge of fully abstract. Its violet semicircle and perpendiculars of green can be read as totally flat before the perception of a lowering sun occurs. A half-moment later, there’s an inkling of nonsensical sublimity. Why is the sky so dark? The brain is not a perfect instrument, and so we doubt we are seeing it right. Like the inverted colour of a film negative, the world has flashed to black.