Kate Nordstrom's Meetinghouse stands square to the viewer and fills nearly the whole picture. Ochre-yellow clapboards are worked in dry, broken paint that lets grey underlayers show through; the roof sits heavy and dark above them; the windows hold panes of blue and teal; the black doorway waits at the center above its stone step. Behind, a mottled blue-grey sky, scraped and stippled. Below, a band of chartreuse grass. There is no road, no season, and no one about. What's left is the building itself — its proportions, its weathering, its plainness. The 1789 Meetinghouse has been painted many times as a feature of the Alna landscape. This is the rarer thing: a portrait of it.

Nordstrom calls the Meetinghouse a vessel of history. Asked what she means, she describes not how the building looks but what it holds: generations of Alna neighbors seated uncomfortably in the box pews, thinking about one another — about the complicated relationships that run beneath the surface of any small town. The painting shows an empty building; what she is painting is everything that has happened inside it.

She and her husband, Aaron Weissblum, came to Alna in 2003 from Cape Ann, Massachusetts, and in her own words the historic Alna Meeting House immediately captured her imagination. She has returned to the subject many times since — before this version and after it. This one is from 2010.