There is, first, the drama-infused perspective of the dwarfed viewer of these paintings, daring a look over Niagara Falls; within reach of the flexed dorsal arc of a passing shark; gazing up at a skyscraper, the dizzying urban equivalent of the mountain; or engaged in an equally vertiginous ocean descent amid drifting jellyfish. In these paintings, the viewer is implicated in an ambiguous narrative of danger either averted or anticipated.

These new paintings also play with traditional landscape painting by foregrounding the way technology and the built environment mediate our perception of the "natural." Reflected clouds float in a glass sky at once tranquil and pitiless. Jellyfish hover in an aqueous ether strangely familiar yet which no human enters without aid. The displaced viewer is perhaps in the water or behind a sheet of glass as a shark passes, in a disorienting play of surfaces balanced compositionally by the shark's elegant bulk.

Never fully representational in intent, Padgett’s paintings often take on the feeling of images pulled from dreams. Their simplified representational style creates a tension between letting the paint dissolve into abstraction and making it represent something recognizable. This tension allows for a more open interpretation of even the most familiar objects.

Unique to Padgett's latest landscape paintings is the sense of discovery made possible by their scaled-down focus, alerting us to the astonishing translucent minutiae of the ocean, or the reflection in a glass building that provides a meditation on time.