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Around 1981, my partner’s parents bought Mike Smith’s painting ‘The Girl and the 101st View of Mt. Fuji’ from a gallery in West Linn, Oregon. Smith was on his way to becoming one of the Northwest’s most popular artists. His exhibitions were selling out before they opened; international art poster companies bought the rights to his images and distributed them widely. Mike Smith in Oregon in the 1980s was like Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico in the 1950s (minus the New York modernist bonafides)—an artist so deeply resonate with a region’s image that he became emblematic. Teenage me saw ‘The Girl’ frequently in the entryway of my partner’s childhood home. Now, I see it every day because it hangs in our living room.

‘The Girl’ is a picture of joy, calm, balance, abundance. There’s a sense of inarticulate romantic longing. It’s painted with the unusual technique of reverse glass, where you paint the back of a transparent material and view it from the front. Jewel-like colors press up hard against the always wet-looking glass. Two buildings form a kind of picture-within-the-picture that frame a tree-spangled plain receding to a perfect snow-capped Mt. Fuji/Mt. Hood. There are water fowl, a galloping horse, fruit trees. A blue sky with a blanket of stars floats above like a hippy version of a Renaissance cathedral vault. It all threatens to collapse into tourist kitsch, but mostly claws back from the edge via sheer painterly commitment.

‘The Girl’ says as much about what some desire to see in Northwest culture as it does about what is excluded from this fantasy. I am attracted to its guilelessness, to its narcotic joy, even as I see that its effect relies on sublimating another set of Northwest values: Orientalist recapitulations of European modernism, for example, or colonial land use, resource extraction and displacement of indigenous people. Is it okay to use ‘The Girl’ as a palliative: alleviating pain, but likely not doing anything to make me better?