Alva Review-Courier -

Left photo by Kyle Larson. "American Dream" image on right provided by Bialke

It wasn't until Madeleine Bialke actually walked deep into the brilliantly white salt plains, surrounded by the sound of the wind and the huge flocks of geese flying overhead, talking to each other, and saw her first mirage, that she had that moment of deeply experiencing the landscape -- a moment of unexpected sublimity. The kind of moment she's constantly waiting for and always surprised by; the moment that later finds its way into one of her paintings, woven in with other such moments – as she's done in the painting on the right, in which the bright white from the salt plain has limned the leaves of her recent painting titled "American Dream."