M. Hyatt
Majestic Mesa Meditation Fox

40 x 30 inches 
Acrylic on archival canvas
2026

"I grew up on farmland, and the moments I remember most vividly are the hours of dawn and dusk. The humidity hung so thick you could see it, dew soaked the fields, and the sun set the landscape aflame. In that ethereal light, I'd watch foxes slip through the fields, and the world felt enormous, charged with a possibility I can't name even now. Those moments were liminal, suspended between day and night, between the ordinary and something numinous. They will never return but the fox carries them for me. And I've learned it carries something similar for others, even if their childhoods looked nothing like mine.

These moments recur across human experience in different forms, but they share an essential quality: brief access to the way we experienced the world before we learned to see it analytically. My paintings attempt to hold that state and return it to the viewer. I call them the quiet hours.

My visual language is inspired by the children's books and coloring books of yesteryear, the first art most of us encountered, the first images that taught us how pictures could contain worlds. By working in this vocabulary, I'm activating a form of visual memory that exists below conscious recognition. Viewers often describe an inexplicable familiarity, a sense of peace they cannot name. This is the work functioning as intended: not as decoration, but as a key to something they thought they'd lost.

The simplified forms and bold color mirror how memory actually works. Childhood recollections are emotionally acute yet formally simplified, vivid in feeling but imprecise in detail.

I am offering viewers a doorway to childhood perception itself, that state where the world felt infinite and fundamentally safe. When peace arrives without explanation, the painting has reached them."

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