Jennifer Samet reviews the exhibition Margaret Grimes, A Retrospective, at Western Connecticut State University, on view through March 14, 2013.

Samet writes: "Margaret Grimes’s paintings are about vastness, not just the all-encompassing kind, but also vastness at the molecular or cellular level. She paints the individual leaf and the entire screen of the forest." Samet concludes that Grimes' works "have a powerful, surprising, and sometimes overwhelming scale, all the more impressive since she works from direct observation. But it is not just about the paintings’ size. Rather it is in their insistence and the explosiveness that comes out of recursive patterning–patterning that we know, intuitively, exists on both a universal and microscopic level."