In the year 2000, while she was getting her MFA at Yale, the Swedish artist Sigrid Sandström ran away to Maine for a summer residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. It was a turning point. “That’s when I started painting landscapes, because it’s basically identical to the Swedish land,” Sandström says. “The lilacs were a little bigger, they bloomed later. Their foxes had different noses. But I recognized every tree type—it was almost like a distorted memory.”

Since then, Sandström, 55, has made the compelling case that a landscape is not just a field or a mountain or a pond; it’s a psychological space as much as a physical one. Her scenes can be muted and desolate, like a pasture stuck between winter and spring, or they can dazzle like the setting sun, and churn like t

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