Chris Miller reviews recent paintings by Erik Weisenburger at Perimeter Gallery, Chicago, on view through February 25, 2015.

Miller writes: "These sixteen visions of life in the north woods take us into that cheerfully lonely natural world once celebrated in Thoreau’s 'Walden.' But there’s more whimsy than morality here, with no sense of the heroic in either the rustic environment or the souls who inhabit it. Erik Weisenburger’s technique is more about building an imaginative oil painting in the studio than in re-experiencing a view of actual fields and woods. His images glow with the inner light of early Northern European painting, and share that genre’s fanatical attention to detail, as if infinite time had been taken to perfect the design and execution of every square inch. No act of concentrated focus goes unrewarded. As with early German painters like Albrecht Altdorfer, he often offers the delicious effect of black, tangled, sharply drawn branches silhouetted against a glowing blue sky."