Daniel Um: Countryside Manners presents paintings of solitary and paired figures traversing forests and open fields, adorned with animal masks and hats that evoke childhood imagination as survival mechanism. Developed during weekend trips to Upstate New York and Pennsylvania, the works draw on Paul Klee's puppet-like whimsy, Oscar Wilde's jewel-toned parables, and the vast natural spaces of German Romanticism to construct a refuge from urban friction. Clyfford Still's vertical partitioning grounds compositions that Klee's rhythmic shorthand then lightens, while Gustav Mahler's Adagietto widened Um's palette into chromatic intervals of subtle intimacy.
