Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, novelist, and memoirist Annie Dillard (American, b.1945)—best known for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Holy the Firm, and Teaching a Stone to Talk—is also a talented and prolific painter. Largely self-taught, Dillard generally works in oil and gouache, and always on a small scale, her canvases rarely more than 16 inches across.

Dillard is a writer lauded as a dedicated observer of the outdoors and, not surprisingly, many of her paintings depict the water and terrain around her homes on Cape Cod, in the Virginia Mountains, and in Key West, as well as vistas of Montana and Maine, often reducing a scene to its bare essentials.

Occasionally Dillard ventures into a quasi-Cubist style, but she's at her strongest when she keeps the motifs simple and the colors sprightly. While there are echoes of Modernist movements in her paintings, Dillard's voice, here, as in her writing, is very much her own.