Eye in the sky: in her aerial views of town and sometimes country, Yvonne Jacquette depicts a world composed as much of interweaving jots of energy as it is of tangible things

As a stingray hovers deep down in the sea, so soundlessly I glided, scarcely moving a wing, high above the earth.

--W.G. Sebald

While painting so precisely their multifarious aerial landscapes, Altdorfer and Brueghel may have been imagining the earth as seen by a soaring bird or by God surveying the creation. We easily forget how recently the high-altitude overview became commonplace. What would otherwise require hours to see as a multiplicity of separate sights we now take in all at once from an airplane's window, recasting the earth as a map of itself. Seeing so much in an instant, traversing the world so quickly, we doubly challenge the constraints of time. To render such an experience is, necessarily, to combine a fleeting perception with a conceptualization, a sensation of great height with a pattern, an instantaneous glimpse of a vast area with a miniaturized model.

Yvonne Jacquette, whose work was recently the subject of a traveling exhibition titled "Aerial Muse: The Art of Yvonne Jacquette," has been sketching and painting from the windows of tall buildings, small planes and commercial jetliners since 1973. The result has been a prolific series of expansive aerial views of Maine, New York City, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Tokyo, Hong Kong and numerous other locations, rural and urban. The view may look down dramatically (Vertiginous: World Financial Area, 1999) or at a raking angle (Mixed Heights and Harbor from World Trade Center II, 1998), or we may be shown a sweeping panorama traversing miles and sometimes leading up to the horizon (San Francisco, 2002). Most often Jacquette extends the ground plane or cluster of buildings up to and, by implication, beyond the borders (Night Wing: Metropolitan Area Composite 11, 1993). The internal scale of the paintings varies greatly depending on the height of the artist's viewpoint.

Within these various formats are several distinctly different sorts of images. Well-known landmarks are featured in many paintings; for example, Night Panorama with Jefferson Memorial and East River View with Brooklyn Bridge (both 1983) could function as public, civic emblems. The lofty vantage point allows the viewer to see the metropolis as a spectacle rather than as the site of gritty social realities. Jacquette's urban views, with their traffic and bustle, are celebrations of a multifaceted, dynamic modernity. The city is documented and memorialized in what amounts to a contemporary interpretation of the 18th-century veduti of Canaletto or Belotto.

By contrast, Jacquette's daytime images of Maine's coastal and inland terrains are more intimate and lyrical and, in such a painting as Sprowl's Lumberyard and Town of Searsmont, Maine II (1988), reportorial in the spirit of a hometown newspaper. Viewed from the moderate altitude of a small hired plane, the familiar forms of houses, a church, a yellow" school bus--all seemingly miniaturized--have the directness of folk art or illustrations for children's books.

Vistas of Asian cities, such as Tokyo Street with Pachinko Parlor II (1985) or Hong Kong Ocean Pier VI (1992), take on a dreamy strangeness, through both their less familiar imagery and the chromatic intensities of neon signs casting their glow on streets, vehicles and water. Painted from the lower vantage points of hotel windows, these pictures focus en the specificities of their exotic subjects.

Jacquette takes an unaffected, workaday approach to subjects that might seem, by their sweeping scale, to call for more dramatic treatment. Her technique is based on graphic marks whose methodical regularity may echo the modular structures represented. Within the terms of her graphic code, distinct strokes of paint may stand for architectural elements, lights, water patterns or headlights of cars in traffic. These characteristic dashes, lines and broader strokes, functioning both as graphic signs and perceptual equivalents for what they represent, also weave together the larger fabric of the picture. Incrementally built up with modesty and care, the paintings seem the result of devotional, contemplative procedures that, though any temptation toward the painterly flourish is resisted, nonetheless yield images of transcendence. For all her attraction to the glitter of nocturnal urban life, Jacquette's is a down-to-earth, American transcendentalism.

Jacquette's philosophical and esthetic temperament is Emersonian in the way that it incorporates divergent influences without compromising its essential identity. Affinities with Japanese culture may be most evident in her Tokyo pictures, but they are apparent, too, in the pictorial structure of much of her work. In certain urban scenes the downward thrust is stabilized by her use of isometric projection, whereby verticals remain parallel rather than converging toward a vanishing point. Her graphically descriptive vocabulary, emphasizing the surface of the picture plane, recalls traditional Japanese printmaking. These techniques provide a consistent, overall focus that reinforces the picture's surface design while also increasing the conceptual clarity of the description. (Such devices can, of course, be inherited through the modernist Western painting of Degas, Cassatt, van Gogh and other 19th-century figures who had already looked at Japan.)