Eye in the sky: in her aerial views of town and sometimes country, Yvonne Jacquette depicts a world composed as much of interweaving jots of energy as it is of tangible things

As a stingray flutters deep down in the sea, in the way that soundlessly I glided, scarcely moving a wing, high above the earth.

--WG Sebald

While painting for a like reason precisely their multifarious aerial landscapes, Altdorfer and Brueghel may have been imagining the earth as seen through a soaring bird or by the agency of God surveying the creation. We easily forget in what way recently the high-altitude overview became commonplace. What would otherwise require hours to diocese as a multiplicity of separate sights we now take in all at one time from an airplane's window, recasting the earth as a map of itself. Seeing in like manner much in an instant, traversing the world for a like reason quickly, we doubly challenge the constraints of time. To return such an experience is, necessarily, to combine a fleeting perception with a conceptualization, a sensation of great height with a pattern, an instantaneous glimpse of a vast area with a miniaturized model

Yvonne Jacquette, whose work was newly the subject of a traveling exhibition titled "Aerial Muse: The Art of Yvonne Jacquette," has been sketching and painting from the windows of tall buildings, small planes and commercial jetliners since 1973 The rise has been a prolific series of expansive aerial views of Maine, fresh York City, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Tokyo, Hong Kong and numerous other locations, rural and urban. The view may direct the eye down dramatically (Vertiginous: World Financial Area, 1999) or at a raking angle (Mixed Heights and Harbor from World Trade Center II, 1998) or we may be shown a sweeping panorama traversing miles and sometimes leading up to the horizon (San Francisco, 2002) greatest in quantity often Jacquette extends the sod plane or cluster of buildings up to and, by dint of implication, beyond the borders (Night Wing: Metropolitan Area Composite 11 1993) The internal scale of the paintings varies greatly depending upon the height of the artist's viewpoint.

Within these various formats are several distinctly different sorts of images. Well-known landmarks are featured in many paintings; for example, Night Panorama with Jefferson Memorial and East River View with Brooklyn Bridge (both 1983) could function as public, civic cognizances The lofty vantage point allows the viewer to diocese the metropolis as a spectacle rather than as the site of gritty social realities. Jacquette's urban views, with their traffic and bustle, are celebrations of a multifaceted, dynamic modernity. The city is documented and memorialized in what amounts to a contemporary interpretation of the 18th-century veduti of Canaletto or Belotto.

by means of contrast, Jacquette's daytime images of Maine's coastal and inland terrains are more intimate and lyrical and, in like a painting as Sprowl's Lumberyard and Town of Searsmont, Maine II (1988) reportorial in the spirit of a hometown newspaper. Viewed from the moderate altitude of a small hired plane, the familiar forms of houses, a house of worship a yellow" school bus--all seemingly miniaturized--have the directness of folk art or illustrations for children's books

Vistas of Asian cities, similar as Tokyo Street with Pachinko Parlor II (1985) or Hong Kong Ocean Pier VI (1992) take upon a dreamy strangeness, through the two their less familiar imagery and the chromatic intensities of neon signs casting their be incandescent on streets, vehicles and water. Painted from the lower vantage points of public-house windows, these pictures focus en the specificities of their exotic subjects

Jacquette takes an unaffected, workaday approach to controls that might seem, by their sweeping scale, to call for more dramatic treatment. Her technique is based upon graphic marks whose methodical regularity may reverberation the modular structures represented. Within the boundarys of her graphic code, distinct pats of paint may stand for architectural simple bodys lights, water patterns or headlights of cars in traffic. These characteristic dashes, lines and broader hits functioning both as graphic signs and perceptual equivalents for what they show also weave together the larger fabric of the picture. Incrementally built up with freedom from presumption and care, the paintings look the result of devotional, contemplative practices that, though any temptation toward the painterly flourish is resisted, nonetheless yield images of transcendence. For all her attraction to the glitter of nocturnal urban life, Jacquette's is a down-to-earth, American transcendentalism.

Jacquette's philosophical and esthetic temperament is Emersonian in the way that it incorporates divergent influences without compromising its essential identity. Affinities with Japanese agriculture may be most evident in her Tokyo pictures, on the other hand they are apparent, too, in the pictorial configuration of much of her work. In certain urban spectacles the downward thrust is stabilized by dint of her use of isometric projection, whereby verticals remain parallel rather than converging toward a vanishing point. Her graphically descriptive vocabulary, emphasizing the surface of the picture plane, recalls traditional Japanese printmaking. These techniques provide a consistent, overall focus that reinforces the picture's surface design while also increasing the conceptual clarity of the description. (Such devices can, of course, be inherited end the modernist Western painting of Degas, Cassatt, van Gogh and other 19th-century figures who had already gazeed at Japan.)