Sweet William by Amy Taluto

Good day! It's literally been ages since Jen first introduced Amy Talluto here, so I'd imagine there are a few of you, new-to-20x200, who haven't yet experienced the wondrousness of her work—you're all in for a treat. Sweet William—depicting a glittering, overgrown ravine—is, like her first edition, Hermaphrodite, hyper-real, gloriously detailed and quite a sight to behold.

Attempts to recognize, record and honor the natural world in this way can easily go awry (often in photography—y'all know what I mean), but Amy expertly wields both brush and pigments, and the effect is more than eye candy. Her work imparts the simultaneous sensations of wonder and fear felt amidst the most intimate encounters in the great outdoors.

Lovely and lush as it is, Sweet William takes its name from the centuries-old Appalachian mountain tune "Barbry Ellen." According to Amy, the song is about two ill-fated lovers, Barbry and William, who die soon after each other in the springtime and are buried side by side. While from each grave greenery grows, we can imagine what is going on in the ground below as decomposition takes its course. Amy admits that she might be projecting a bit (and I readily admit that I, of course, am, too). But, as she writes, "I find working in the studio from a photo allows me to have enough distance from the original scene to allow me to impose more of my own psychology and color onto the raw material of the collected image."

However she does it, she manages to replicate the succession of feelings—from admiration to awe, to stillness and silence, to slight discomfort (and hopefully back to amazement)—when you see something incredibly stunning. It could be nothing extraordinary—a patch of grass, or light behind leaves, or a particular blue of water. But whatever it is, you recognize it as something both bewildering and bewitching; something much bigger than us, simply: not human—that part of nature that we cannot touch or control and that will eventually outlive us.

— Sara