While collecting stones along the east coast of his hometown in Maine, it dawned on artist Alan Magee how the beauty of an object draws in its own attention. His hyperrealistic acrylic and oil paintings look unbelievably like photographs, capturing the quiet intensity of those stones, pebbles and rocks that demanded his contemplation. Each is arranged in softly lit, zen like compositions, where Magee has stacked them like cairns or on top of other objects, while in other pieces, they appear scattered like a starry Milky Way galaxy, bleached white by the sun and sand with their own stories to tell. “Attention and beauty are so closely linked,” he says. “So many of the problems that we seem to be bumping our heads against constantly, that we are struggling with interpersonally and internationally, are related to a failure of appreciation. If it’s true that with heightened attention places, objects, and people reveal themselves as singularly beautiful, then surely the inverse of this must govern our dismissals and our hatred of the unfamiliar. It is not such a reach if you come to these conclusions if you draw and paint.”
At first glance, the work of Canadian artist 