There’s an overwhelming gape of warm pinkness and sweetness on the wall. The color and flavor it imparts are both so richly evoked that it takes you a moment to recognize that the image is not just an abstract representation of the concepts of pink and sweet, and, for that matter, only partly made up of pink. But the image is so simple, and the pink is so strong, two solid slices of color that lean towards the yellows and oranges which resolve into the soft dough of a pair of donuts resting on one another.

The pinkness is the wet, shiny icing; it’s wet and shiny both as icing, with a large smear of pure white reflected light close to the top right corner, and as the thick, glossy layers of oil paint that have created the pastries that are looming over you. The paint is almost gooey on the icing, next to the slightly rougher hatching that describes the dough beneath. Pink guides your attention, too, acting as arms of candy that envelop the painting and frame the hypnotizing, deep red center of the largest donut. This crimson area is a triangular notch pointing to another red shadow, which in turn becomes a fine dark thread that runs off the lower left edge of the painting. You don’t just wander off there, though—in fact you can’t, because your eyes are drawn back to the next contour they see: a curving scarlet line, where the icing on the second donut ends, which wraps back into the image right above the last shadow and leads straight back into that alizarin hole. These rich red zones are so inviting and so central to the image that it’s not until you walk away, later, that you realize they weren’t actually in the exact center. (They were, in fact, restricted to the left half of the image.)

Of course, it’s a while until you leave the painting. The warmth and softness is tempting. While the image itself arouses nostalgia for the trespasses of sweet indulgences, the warmth is also literal. The coolest color in the painting is the deep maroon of the upper background, and a few streaks of contrasting blue-white where the orange-brown cast shadow meets the nondescript surface the donuts are resting on (visible only as a tiny wedge of white at the very bottom of the huge canvas). Maybe there are a few hints of a cool gray underpainting, but otherwise everything is richly warm, and made of yellows and oranges and reds. Something, too, about the tactile fleshy texture of the surface keeps you fascinated, makes you wish you could touch, could taste, the pinkness.

(Big Pink, Emily Eveleth, 2016. Tang Museum, Skidmore College.)

Amid the chaos of the lodge already filled with indistinguishable figures clad in clashing ski clothes, I only notice the young man standing several tables away because I recognize his shirt—gray with a design of an astronaut bearing crossed skis and poles, and the words “FAT SKI-A-THON” in a dark, massive sans-serif. The shirt is familiar to me because one with the same imagery lies somewhere in my laundry, a relic of when I skied here regularly several years ago. “Fat Ski-a-thon” is an annual local fundraising event, and a tradition that my friends and I took pride in, as well as used as a source of amiable competition.

This man is not, however, one of these friends. His face is wholly unfamiliar: dark-haired and mustached, and his skin is so pale that it looks unharmed by the cold and wind on the mountain. The shirt, too, is different: the astronaut image is smaller and level with the text and logos of sponsors, unlike mine, where the drawing is central and above the text. It must be from a different year, but he’s too far away for me to see any numbers.

As he cleans his goggles, I think about the sort of person he seems to represent. People who enjoy, not “sports” per se, but perhaps the broader term of “athletics”—still forms of exercise that can be done communally, but encompassing activities that don’t necessarily have the same association with hypermasculinity as mainstream American team sports do. Skiing can be one of those things; maybe he started skiing because he wanted to be active and get out but couldn’t, for whatever reason, participate in the domain of the aggressively confident Bro. I notice that he’s been focused on cleaning his goggles for a very long time, longer than usually needed to get them clean enough to see out of. 

The Fat Ski-a-thon shirt also hints at a character type. The event is one that capitalizes on skiers’ penchant for speed and tallies: you can pledge a certain amount of money to be donated (to an organization for physically disabled skiers, fittingly) per each run that you can do on a certain lift over the course of one day. The lift services almost exclusively steep, rocky runs. Everyone I know who participated in the event took it as a rewarding challenge, and would of course brag about how much they’d been able to do. Maybe he, too, leapt at the Ski-a-thon as an opportunity to prove his skiing abilities, to revel in the material proof, in the form of counted runs, that all the time he spends on the mountain has been worth it. Maybe he went with a group of friends, all with the same personal motive and a genuine love for each other’s company and support in the harsh New England winter conditions, veiled under a race for the highest number of laps on the daunting summit.

Now he’s sitting back down, and he has the same bored, exhausted look that most of the people around him have. He seems mildly distressed as he glances around the gathering lunch crowd. Maybe looking for someone—I realize he’s sitting alone. He’s probably a local, given the Ski-a-thon shirt, but living somewhere only gives someone so much of the nebulous “sense of belonging” that is touted in most clichéd narratives. Even a familiar place can feel isolating when you’re not around the people who have made it familiar.

I am distracted by a rise in nearby conversation and turn briefly back to the people I’m sitting with. One of them is someone who I used to ski here with regularly, nearly five years ago. The long period of estrangement between us has just been resolved in order to return to this place of nostalgia and camaraderie. After a few moments of talking to them, I look back to the man I was watching, thinking about how I recognize in him a feeling of alienation, but he has put his jacket and helmet on and is walking out into the bright snow.

(Gatehouse Lodge, Sugarbush Resort, Warren, VT. 2/23/2018)