Here's another way to think about the Big Picture. Make a small something big. Leslie Wood's best works in her current show at Eine Kleine Gallery in Covington do just that. They are, to use a term out of fashion in today's art world, beautiful. Nature is her usual subject for these photographs, its detail and complexity her delight. She shows us raindrops on a hosta leaf, a magnolia bloom on the shy threshold of opening and makes what amounts to a triptych with three photos of different colored lichen, gold, gray and green.

My favorite, though, is "Rock Detail," 18 by 24 inches, in which colors range from pale beige and gold to the richness of many shades of brown, the whole picked out by delicate blue lichen that trace the curves of what might be internal fault lines. These sinuous lines, with and without lichen, echo each other and form swirls, some turning in on themselves and some open-ended. The surface looks like a marvelous meltdown that's congealed.

But "Rock Detail" also makes me think of landscape as seen from an airplane window. Not on this side of the Mississippi but beyond and below the Great Plains in the Southwest, near but not of the Grand Canyon. So the Big Picture has become very big indeed, extrapolating from a relatively small rock surface to the boundless West.

A picture like "Rock Detail" runs as close to abstraction as photography can pull off. Abstraction itself, after a heyday when it carried everything before it in the painting world, like beauty is no longer many artists' prime goal. Both beauty and abstraction give the viewer and the maker sensual pleasures too good to miss, however, and each continues turning up, fashion or no fashion.