In one panel of Giovanni di Paolo’s 1454 Baptist Predella, a pink-clad Saint John the Baptist ascends a grey path into a density of crags. The rock formation looms above a patchwork green field dotted with tiny pink buildings.

The world “is the sum of its parts and the parts are all local,” wrote the Cumbrian painter Sheila Fell (1931–79) in 1961. She was describing her relationship to the mountains and mining landscapes of her childhood, the explicit subject of her oeuvre. Its implicit subject, however, is the metabolization of experience through paint.