Earth Music: Two Painters, One Song

What if the earth could sing—and we stopped to listen?

That’s the idea behind Earth Music, a new exhibit opening April 4 at Spiralis Gallery in Easton. It combines the work of Dane Tilghman and Larry Horowitz—two painters with very different styles and backgrounds but with something in common—a shared connection to land, memory, and story.

Tilghman’s paintings often focus on the African American experience, pulling from the visual language of the Harlem Renaissance, blues and jazz, and old black-and-white photos. Horowitz paints landscapes—vivid, textured, and full of feeling. Spiralis Gallery owner Gail Patterson saw a kind of thread running through their work: not the same stories, but the same quiet force.

“I think the show—Earth Music—speaks volumes about how and what the earth could tell us if we listened,” said Patterson. “Joys and sorrows, beauty and horrors, history both known and silent, from both of their perspectives and brushes.”

When asked what Earth Music meant to him, Tilghman said. “I believe the earth definitely has a rhythm. “It’s a spiritual rhythm, I believe, also a very cultural rhythm, for sure.”

Horowitz came at it from another angle but landed in a similar place. “I’m very sensitive to the tides, the wind, the earth, nature, animals, birds—everything influences me when I’m out there and doing my painting,” he said. “So for me, ‘rhythm of the land’ is sort of my mantra. You might say it’s what I’m after when I paint.”

Patterson called the pairing “serendipitous… kind of ‘spiralis’-like,”—referring to the gallery’s name and the idea of things moving in a spiral formation. “Sometimes we’re close, and sometimes we collide in ways we don’t see,” she said.

That concept is alive in this exhibit and the artists, but, as Tilghman noted, both are rooted in something deeper. “I’m painting people,” he said. “Larry’s painting landscapes. But those people—I’m sure, have passed through those same landscapes. That’s the bridge, right there. I’m working from old black-and-white photos, and a lot of those folks are long gone. But they were there.”

Horowitz looked at it from the painter’s side. “A painting is made up of wooden stretchers, bars, linen canvas, hemp paint—all inanimate objects,” he said. “We take these physical things, and we manipulate them with shapes, tones, colors, and we make this inanimate art have a heartbeat. It becomes something much greater than the sum of its parts. And I think that’s what connects both of us.”

For Patterson, it wasn’t about finding two artists who do the same thing—it was about finding two who evoke the same response. “There was a commonality in the work for me as a collector and as a gallerist,” she said. “Both Dane and Larry’s work are highly evocative for me. I look at the landscapes Larry paints, and I can close my eyes and imagine the light changing, the leaves falling, and the breeze. I can feel who and what might have passed—person, raccoon, deer—through that landscape. Who might have been on that boat?”

Of one of Tilghman’s pieces, the Oyster Tonger, she said. “I look at him and wonder: is he out there because he wants to be, or because he has to be?”

“There’s a story in both of their work,” she said of the artists. “That’s what pulled me in.”

Horowitz talked about how painting, for him, isn’t just about a moment—it’s about the accumulation of moments. “I think of the Impressionists,” he said. “They tried to go after a moment in time. I paint the passage of time. While the painting is being painted—let’s say en plein air—the sky changes. A bird flies by. Someone walks into my picture plane. I put them in. Dane also is painting, in a way, the passage of time.”

Tilghman agreed that his work often highlights people history tends to overlook. “My philosophy is that these particular people might not be important in life now, but they were important to somebody,” he said. “So I want to honor their existence on earth.”

That presence shows in the work and in Patterson’s description of Tilghman’s Two in a Field. “It has almost a vague impressionist quality. It’s not exactly strictly figurative, like photographic. On the first pass, I think, my Lord, this is just beautiful. The colors speak to me,” she said. “And then I look deeper, and I realize it’s two Black Americans in times of enslavement, picking cotton with the cotton sacks trailing out behind them. I had to pause when I looked at that piece because it made me think—why was I experiencing such a beautiful feeling from something that was such a horror for our country?”

But that’s what makes interesting art, she said—the fact that it is story-driven, for instance, in Horowitz’s painting South Carolina Sunrise. “There are boats. And I wonder—did they just go out? Are they coming back? Who’s on board? What’s the story?”

Horowitz agreed. A painting is almost like an onion,” he said. “You look at it, and you might get that first facial reaction. Hopefully you fall in love—you separate yourself from the distresses of life. But then you bring it home, or you go back to look at it again in the museum or the gallery, and your mood changes. The world changes. We keep peeling those layers of the onion off.”

He added, “And I think it’s very true in Dane’s work, especially. Yes, he’s painting something from the past. Someone might see it as beautiful, decorative shapes and colors. But there’s just so much to it. There’s so much that Dane has put into it and so much that the viewer can bring to it. It’s not what you put in a painting—it’s what you leave out that’s so important.”

Tilghman said he hopes his paintings keep telling their own story long after they’re hung on a wall. “It should make me smile,” he said. “So it’s an eternal piece.”

Earth Music, then, is about stories. Not just art you look at, but art that asks you to stop—and listen.

The show opens with a meet-the-artists reception on April 4 and 5, from 5 to 7 p.m., at Spiralis Gallery in Easton. It runs through the end of April. Spiralis is located at 35 Dover St in Easton.