“The house, even more than the landscape, is a “psychic state,” even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy,” wrote Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space. When I recall the quote to painter Gabrielle Garland, she’s quick to tell me that she, like Bachelard, is “definitely a phenomenologist. That’s me!” To view her luminous oil paint portraits of technicolor houses is to understand precisely what Bachelard meant by the “psychic state” of a home. Though many of the buildings feature ubiquitous American gabled roofs and prototypical facades, under Garland’s gaze, the houses are rendered anew, distinctive, and alive with the aspirations of the people just inside. “When the image is new, the world is new,”…