Earlier, composing a holiday message for US postal delivery, the painter stressed the Ghandi-like simplicity of life at her carpenter-brother’s place in Montana, arguing that his re-creation of a frontier village, built from a recycled barn, could be a place where cowboys and philosophers might meet to hammer out ideas for rescuing the planet from its capitalist predators.  Now, posting its image on the internet  (that double-edged instrument of human “progress”), it is the intricacies of created form that crowd her thoughts.    Somehow trees became barn; there, animals sheltered until entropy happened and its dilapidated elements were reincarnated: voila! an invented world ready to pose for its portrait in oils; and now presto! a paintscape morphed into—pixels.  Surely we are tangled up in tech.  What (on earth) would Plato have said about so much manufactured reality?  So many transformations?  Such a mix of real and virtual?  It seems likely the painter and her brother would knock in vain at the gates of The Republic.  No matter; Ravens’ Way, perched as it is on the edge of melting glaciers, offers its own utopia, inviting human reflection in a realm where Amazon is still a river located far to the south in its own fragile environment, its natural glories at risk, while, nearby, to the north, dissolving ice caps merit human respect and attention.