A golden-haired girl in a wooden swing sweeps across a lush landscape animated by vivid colors: turquoise skies with gauzy white clouds, horses with thick auburn manes flying behind them, a meadow so green you can almost smell the new grass. The canvas is dizzying, stretching nearly ten feet wide and four feet high. But the dreamlike idyll of Through Verna’s Window dissipates when you spot the jagged trio of rumbling volcanoes behind the swinging child, the sharp-toothed fox stalking her, the deep water rushing beneath her bare feet, and Verna, somber and still, looking on.
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Fairy tales and feminine imagery find form in Narrow Escape. Beneath a golden sky pasted with the kind of shiny gold stars children earn for their schoolwork, a girl flees from a pair of cottages across a yard full of flowers and furniture toward the abrupt edge of a waterfall, where a fox hides beneath the swirling waters. “She wanted to be a princess,” says Boies. “Remember when everyone wanted to be a princess? In a way, that’s very precious. But it’s atavistic, one-dimensional. She is escaping that, but what she is escaping to is also very dangerous. It’s a long hard journey to make it to the cemetery to sing.”
