How fortunate we are to have Sand Storm by Agnes Pelton so close to home. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has, over time, become not just a repository of great works but a space for introspection, where nature and art converse, where silence enhances seeing, and where paintings like Sand Storm do not merely hang on a wall but actively shape the inner landscape of the viewer.
Pelton’s work invites a different kind of looking. Some paintings demand attention with grandeur or narrative force, but Sand Storm requires patience, a quieting of the mind, an attunement to subtleties that might at first be imperceptible. To see this painting is to experience movement—not the hurried, erratic movement of an uncontrolled force, but a slow and deliberate unfolding. Pelton does not present the storm as an agent of destruction but rather as a state of becoming.
In her hands, a sandstorm ceases to be a blinding force that obscures and erases. Instead, it transforms.
Unlike traditional landscapes, which depict storms as external events, Pelton internalizes the sandstorm, rendering it not as something that happens to the land, but something that arises within it—a pulse, a breath, a force that is not separate from the environment but essential to it.
Her accompanying poem gives us insight into how she understood this phenomenon:
***
SAND STORM
By Agnes Pelton
Dense clouds that push and loom
Too early, darkening the day.
Above the streaming palms
Bent low to earth
Sharp points of blowing sand converge
Are poised beneath the sky’s light blue
In balanced conformation.
Below this flowering, remote, serene
Behold the movement luminous –
A rainbow in the dust.
***
The storm looms too early, disrupting the natural order of things. The palms bend, not breaking but yielding, allowing the wind to move through them rather than against them. The sand converges—not chaotically, but in a balanced conformation, a phrase that upends the usual understanding of storms as formless tempests of destruction.
Then, in the final stanza, Pelton offers a revelation: Behold the movement luminous—A rainbow in the dust.
What a powerful contradiction. A rainbow, a symbol of clarity and light, appearing within dust, a symbol of obscurity and disarray. Here is Pelton’s gift: to find harmony within apparent disorder, to reveal something radiant within the murk of transformation.
In reading her words, I cannot help but think of William Blake, another artist who refused to separate vision from poetry, who understood that the spiritual and the material were not two separate realms but one continuous reality. Like Pelton, Blake was not merely an artist—he was a seer. His illuminated manuscripts merged image and verse into a singular, heightened experience, insisting that the world of symbols and dreams was just as real as the physical world.
Blake’s most famous lines from Auguries of Innocence resonate deeply with Sand Storm:
"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour."
Pelton, like Blake, paints with this same mystical sensibility. Her storm is not simply a storm—it is a portal. To stand before it is to be invited into a state of contemplation, to see beyond the surface of things, to recognize that even within obscurity, there is clarity, that even in upheaval, there is a secret order at work.
Blake believed that the artist was a prophet, that their role was not simply to imitate nature but to reveal truths hidden beneath it. Pelton, in her luminous abstraction, follows this same impulse. She does not give us a desert storm as it appears to the eye; she gives us the essence of the storm, the spirit of the wind, the movement of transformation itself.
What speaks to me most in Sand Storm is its assertion that change is not random or meaningless. So often, the storms of life come too early, disrupting carefully laid plans, unsettling what seemed secure. These storms—emotional, existential—feel like agents of destruction, scattering the familiar and leaving only uncertainty in their wake.
And yet, Pelton suggests another way of seeing.
She asks us to consider that within the storm, there is balance. Within the sand, there is color. Within the dust, there is luminous movement.
Perhaps the storms that unsettle us are not meant to break us but to reshape us.
I think about the times in my own life when the ground beneath me has felt unsteady—when relationships ended, when paths I had expected to walk were suddenly closed to me, when I found myself in a place I had never intended to be. In those moments, it was easy to believe that I was lost, that everything was collapsing around me. But looking back, I wonder if those storms were less about ruin and more about redirection.
Pelton’s palms do not resist the wind. They bend. The storm does not obscure forever; it reveals. And in the final moment of the poem, when all seems disarrayed, a rainbow appears.
Is that not how transformation works?
One of the gifts of having Sand Storm at Crystal Bridges is the ability to return to it again and again. There is a difference between seeing a painting once and seeing it over time—allowing it to shape the way one thinks, allowing its meaning to shift as one's own life shifts.
Pelton’s work does not offer answers, but it does offer insight. She teaches us that movement is not always chaotic, that storms are not always to be feared, and that what appears at first to be obscurity may, in fact, be illumination in progress.
I have stood before Sand Storm in different chapters of life, and I suspect I will stand before it again in the future. Some paintings change with time, but others remain constant, revealing instead that it is we who have changed.
Perhaps, in a future storm, I will remember Pelton’s words.
Perhaps, in the dust, I will see a rainbow.