There is a painting in the Caldwell Wing of Vaelthir University that visitors tend to stand in front of longer than they mean to. It is Marn Ourelle’s Unfalling, the first and best known of her blossom series, and it depicts nothing more dramatic than a branch of coastal almond in full flower against a flat grey sky. What unsettles people, once they notice it, is that the petals are not falling. They hang. The wind is plainly in the canvas, the grass beneath is bent flat with it, and yet not one blossom has let go. Ourelle painted it after the season first refused to turn, and it has become the closest thing our region has to a defining image. I want to use it, and the enormous body of work that has gathered around it, to ask a question I do not think Wexamour has been willing to ask itself: in all the painting we have done of this endless spring, has our art been blooming, or has it simply been refusing, like Ourelle’s petals, to fall?

First, the Grief

The early work is, to my eye, the honest work. In the first shock of the Silence, when no one yet understood that the season was not going to turn, Wexamour’s artists did what frightened people have always done, which is to make something out of the fear. Edreth Vance composed the Hollow Cantata in those early days, scoring it for a choir that never resolves its final chord, and the effect in a concert hall is genuinely difficult to sit through, in the way the best art about grief is supposed to be. Art students at Vaelthir University filled the school grounds with figures mid-motion, caught reaching or turning, never arriving. The Dispatch ran poems in its back pages, some of them quite bad and all of them sincere, about waking each morning to the same unbroken blossom. This was art made by people who did not yet know what they were living through, and that uncertainty gave the work its charge. It trembles. It does not know how it ends, because nobody did.

The Evernal, it should be said, produced a strand of this early work too, and theirs is the most beautiful and the most troubling of all. Their devotional painting treats the frozen spring not as a wound but as a mercy, a held breath that need never be exhaled, and the craftsmanship is frequently extraordinary. One looks at it and understands, uncomfortably, the appeal of believing that nothing good ever has to end.

Then, the Stall

It is the later work that troubles me, and I suspect I will take some letters for saying so. At some point no one can name, Wexamour’s art about the Silence stopped being about fear and started being about itself. The unfalling blossom became a motif, then a brand, then a thing you can buy painted on a teacup in any stall on the University mesa. Ourelle’s imitators have produced more variations on the branch that will not shed than anyone could hope to number, and almost all of them have made the same quiet substitution: they have taken an image that once meant dread and repainted it to mean comfort. The petals no longer refuse to fall. They are simply, prettily, permanent. The terror has been varnished out.

This is the part critics are not supposed to say in a region that has built a tourist economy and a good deal of its civic identity on this imagery, but I will say it. A great deal of our recent art is technically lovely and spiritually stuck. It has stopped asking what it means to live in a spring that will not end and started congratulating us for living there. It has made peace with the stillness, and in making peace with it, it has become still itself.

And here is the part that ought to chill us. The most celebrated painters in Wexamour are producing, with magnificent skill, the same canvas they produced when the Silence began, and they are the very same painters. Not their students, not their heirs. Them. No one has aged out of the work, because no one has aged at all. The hand that made Unfalling is the same hand, unchanged, still at the easel, painting the same branch it painted at the start. Our artists cannot grow, because nothing in Wexamour grows. They are as fixed as their subject, and the work knows it.

The Verdict

I do not think the Silence ruined our art. I think it did something more insidious, which is that it gave our art a subject so total that it never had to look for another. An artist in any other region must go out and find their material. Ours need only step outside, where it is always the same magnificent spring, and paint what is in front of them, which is what was in front of them before and will be in front of them ever after. The early work survived that condition because it was still in shock. The later work has surrendered to it. The blossom that would not fall was, at the start, the most frightening image our artists could imagine. That we have made it our most comforting one may be the truest thing this deathless season has revealed about us, and it is not, I am sorry to report, a flattering one.

Ron Rudson is the Chronicle’s Arts Critic. He has been reviewing the cultural life of Wexamour for the Vaelthir section for longer than he cares to print. Letters, including the indignant ones, may be sent by owl.