Provoked to visual explosions by the ancient Indian epic-myth, The Ramayana, Zinnes’s current paintings contain the spirit of the storyteller in the guise of the abstract adventurer. Not illustrations or literal translations, they are instead transformations from poetry to mysterious abstract landscapes of a dream world inhabited by figure, animal and birdlike images. These paintings suggest that the boundaries between underworld and waking earth are traversable, that terror coexists with joy, and that loss must always yield to renewal.

For years Zinnes painted the landscape of rural northeastern Pennsylvania, and that landscape space is in her bones and blood. Now, rather than suggesting the light and space of an actual motif, her landscapes are cast deep in the rich colors of myth and poetry-the language and pictures we create to understand the world at its least understandable.