Having functionally banished the likes of Apollo (the only comparable figure is a devil driving a logging truck, but he keeps to the road), Ryden leaves his nymphs free to roam in a state of prelapsarian wonder. As surrogates for the viewer, they present the possibility of a kinder, gentler relationship to nature, one driven by compassion and curiosity rather than covetousness and aggression. At peace with the bears, squirrels and other animals that populate this world, they approach the trees with reverence, as keepers of secrets and sacred knowledge, their wisdom frequently connoted by the presence of a single, centralized eye-an eye that registers the devastation man has wrought with weary resignation. In an especially lovely painting called The Apology, a girl in a yellow dress sits before an upturned stump, her hands raised in a gesture of graceful conciliation. An eye at the center of the stump receives the offering with dignity. The painting's hand-carved frame, meanwhile, radiates with delicate tendrils that echo the roots of the stump, expanding its presence magically outward, into the space of the gallery itself. Bernini's Apollo and Daphne is a violent swirl of a sculpture, characterized by a tumbling forward propulsion that seems liable to lift the marble into the air at any moment; The Apology, by contrast, is the very image of equilibrium: humanity and nature in balance.