Sean Cairns:
And when morning comes it comes in the morning and never at night![]()
08.24.26 - 10.17.26
︎Checklist
︎Checklist
Where-wolf: Sean Cairns’s Mythical Forests
“And when the morning comes, it comes in the morning and not in the night.” A quizzical sentence introduces this exhibition of lush landscapes by the painter Sean Cairns. Taken from poet Frank Stanford, this statement is both matter of fact and mysterious, requiring a second reading to confirm its meaning. A perfect way to describe Cairns’s body of work, which unfolds over time, rewarding close looking, both a stubborn fact of its material existence and a transcendent journey.
A series of nocturnal scenes, Cairns’s paintings depict the ever-darkening sky over the course of the night. The moon is a crucial figure, representing our interrelation with the natural world; a marker of both menstrual cycles and ocean tides, it is a force beyond our world that dictates its daily rhythms. Indeed, nature here is the protagonist. Cairns chose a vertical format, the domain of portraiture, instead of the horizontal realm of landscape, for the entire series, upending the hierarchical divide between man and earth.
Cairns recollected a recent trip through the Ozarks near where he grew up that served as inspiration for an alternate title for this show. Just before dawn, he passed through a small town in Missouri, which the municipal limit sign let him know was “Ware.” The grogginess of night travel sent him into momentary dream state—“Ware” could be “where,” which could be “were,” as in “werewolf,” this transitional figure between beast and man that stalks the night.
Cairns trained as a sculptor, and over the past ten years, as he took up painting, he has moved from a more graphic figurative style to the current work, which is completely devoid of the human figure. Several of the works are rendered with atmospheric perspective, which give the work a hazy sense of depth that you can lost in, giving you the impression of wandering through a forest with limited visibility. Details emerge as your eyes adjust, deer appear unexpectedly. However, there is a push and pull against that depth that is reinforced by his distinctive technique. He mixes sand with his oil paint that gives the surfaces of his canvases a grit and creates a topographic treatment not so unlike the natural terrain we imaginatively traverse. As much as you want to float into the depths of the great beyond in Cairn’s painting, you can also get stuck on the surface.
Cairns has spent thousands of hours poring over the details of paintings in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art in his former day job serving as a preparator for a collection digitization project and hanging dozens of shows from Impressionist and Postimpressionist masters to contemporary artists like Laura Owens, Cecily Brown, and Matthew Wong. Cairns has internalized from this prolonged exposure a sensitivity to the great art historical compositional devices that get reinvented with each passing generation. Yet as much as I might see a paraphrase here and there from his favorite wits, when I look at Cairns’s paintings, I imagine following Cairns through his own ancestral forest. For wherever you go, there you are.
- Dr. Katherine Broadbeck
“And when the morning comes, it comes in the morning and not in the night.” A quizzical sentence introduces this exhibition of lush landscapes by the painter Sean Cairns. Taken from poet Frank Stanford, this statement is both matter of fact and mysterious, requiring a second reading to confirm its meaning. A perfect way to describe Cairns’s body of work, which unfolds over time, rewarding close looking, both a stubborn fact of its material existence and a transcendent journey.
A series of nocturnal scenes, Cairns’s paintings depict the ever-darkening sky over the course of the night. The moon is a crucial figure, representing our interrelation with the natural world; a marker of both menstrual cycles and ocean tides, it is a force beyond our world that dictates its daily rhythms. Indeed, nature here is the protagonist. Cairns chose a vertical format, the domain of portraiture, instead of the horizontal realm of landscape, for the entire series, upending the hierarchical divide between man and earth.
Cairns recollected a recent trip through the Ozarks near where he grew up that served as inspiration for an alternate title for this show. Just before dawn, he passed through a small town in Missouri, which the municipal limit sign let him know was “Ware.” The grogginess of night travel sent him into momentary dream state—“Ware” could be “where,” which could be “were,” as in “werewolf,” this transitional figure between beast and man that stalks the night.
Cairns trained as a sculptor, and over the past ten years, as he took up painting, he has moved from a more graphic figurative style to the current work, which is completely devoid of the human figure. Several of the works are rendered with atmospheric perspective, which give the work a hazy sense of depth that you can lost in, giving you the impression of wandering through a forest with limited visibility. Details emerge as your eyes adjust, deer appear unexpectedly. However, there is a push and pull against that depth that is reinforced by his distinctive technique. He mixes sand with his oil paint that gives the surfaces of his canvases a grit and creates a topographic treatment not so unlike the natural terrain we imaginatively traverse. As much as you want to float into the depths of the great beyond in Cairn’s painting, you can also get stuck on the surface.
Cairns has spent thousands of hours poring over the details of paintings in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art in his former day job serving as a preparator for a collection digitization project and hanging dozens of shows from Impressionist and Postimpressionist masters to contemporary artists like Laura Owens, Cecily Brown, and Matthew Wong. Cairns has internalized from this prolonged exposure a sensitivity to the great art historical compositional devices that get reinvented with each passing generation. Yet as much as I might see a paraphrase here and there from his favorite wits, when I look at Cairns’s paintings, I imagine following Cairns through his own ancestral forest. For wherever you go, there you are.
- Dr. Katherine Broadbeck