ISCA GREENFIELD-SANDERS 2024

ISCA GREENFIELD-SANDERS

BLUE SKIES

Lilly Wei

Isca Greenfield-Sanders’s new paintings are much like her previous works: landscapes of such glowing beauty that they might restore our once widely held belief that “God’s in his heaven, All’s right with the world” (although it has been some time since the Victorian poet Robert Browning’s assertion could be quoted without skepticism or irony). Nonetheless, there is reassurance—all the more welcome because it is so rare these days—in the steadiness of a vision that is (literally) blue-skied and upbeat, both nostalgic and timeless.

The world of Greenfield-Sanders’s imagination is poised delicately, gracefully adjacent to the world as it exists, a world increasingly threatened with extinction due to our self-destructive follies. Her sense of nature is not the Romantic notion of the sublime; rather, she views it from a more benign, non-adversarial, feminist-inflected perspective. Preferring a less overwhelming intention and scale, she o en populates her scenes with people at ease in nature, implicitly aware of its enveloping glories. There are fewer figures, though, in this exhibition’s selection; nature is cast in the lead role.

Greenfield-Sanders’s paintings appear to spill over with colors, but she uses only a handful, she says (quinacridones, ultramarine blues, viridians, terre verte, and aureolins, with a preference for translucent hues). There are no blacks here, and she paints no nocturnal vistas. If her works are not always about morning in America, they are never about night. She is more interested in exploring and capturing the interplay of daylight and color on water, beach, fields, earth, and trees, for instance, and finding new ways to portray them. Her work wheels through time, seasons, and weather, de ly summoning the transparent hues of early morning, the diffused light of an over-

cast day, the brightness of a summer noon so incandescent that you might think you need to blink while regarding it, or a wintry scene that looks so cold you might shiver. Most o en, the paintings are dominated by the blues of skies, lakes, seas, distant mountains, and shadows.

One of her newest paintings, Seven Trees (2024), is strewn with diagonal ribbons of a silken blue in the foreground that read as shadows. But how can those trees cast such shadows? Are they actually shadows? That hardly ma ers, however, since they activate and anchor the painting and are critical to the composition. These kinds of feints and teasing ambiguities are common in a practice in which the needs of the painting trump that of verisimilitude. Blue, lightened, darkened, or brushed with white, can become foam-capped waves, snow, an icebound lake, or a pooled surface of water so still that it can act as a mirror reflecting the images of two children at play.

The paintings are also awash in beguiling pinks, some evoking meadows tangled with wildflowers or huge banks of rosy cumulus clouds. Then there are the greens, in woods and grasses. The horizon also shi s. It is raised and lowered as if seen through a lens to expand and contract the pictorial space. The focus is o en moved to the middle ground, its imagery clearly delineated, while the foreground is out of focus and the background is blued, using a form of atmospheric perspective to imply distance. Her techniques are suggestive of the artists she admires, among them Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Alfred Sisley, and Édouard Manet, whose flower paintings are exquisite.

Greenfield-Sanders is not a plein air painter, and mimesis, as noted, is not her primary goal. Even when she was eight years old, she wanted to make landscapes. As a young artist, she knew landscapes were old-fashioned, but that didn’t dissuade her. Once making landscapes was a given, she pivoted to the more challenging task of how she would realize those landscapes since, regardless of the style or subject ma er, paintings are, before all else, as the Postimpressionist artist Maurice Denis pointed out, “essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.”

Eventually, she started sourcing her content from 1950s and ’60s photographs, not a surprising choice since she grew up with the medium. (She is the daughter of an eminent portrait photographer.) She buys the photographs, taken by anonymous amateurs, in large lots, then eagerly rummages through them in search of images she finds compelling. The images are remarkably similar, she discovered, almost all of them commemorating leisurely moments in the daily lives of ordinary mid-century Americans. Prompts to memory, they shape the way we remember the past, which is, of course, a blend of truth and fiction.

Although her paintings are constructions and not real places, she is o en asked to identify the scene she has painted. Many of those who inquire insist that they know the location and have been there. She finds that affirming since she wants the painting to be a repository of sorts, to offer sufficient imaginative space for viewers to insert their personal memories into it.

The process that Greenfield-Sanders has evolved is elaborate and methodical. It is based on a combination of photography and painting, the former a medium predicated on speed, the la er much slower to execute. Her process is system-driven and begins with a selection of photographic images. (She believes most contemporary representative painters work from photographs or some form of replicated or generated imagery.) Then the images are digitized and combined. She transforms these composites into watercolors, followed by small 17-inch paintings. From there, she scales up to larger paintings in various dimensions. All of this is a way of collecting information and extending the process to determine how the image functions and how it feels, visually and emotionally. As she proceeds, she determines what is successful and what is not. Her process allows time to consider, adjust, and add depth to the work. The idea of slow painting is in this instance as much about the making of the painting as it is about looking at it.

When asked what might be different in her new works, she said that because she changes and sees things differently, her paintings inevitably change. She started to paint when she was quite young. A er 25 years, her skills have improved, and she has become more fluent. But there is

always something else she wants to achieve. Perhaps she is confronted by something she hadn’t noticed before in a favorite work or a favorite artist. So it is a continuous learning curve.

These are not meant to be heroic paintings. They might be considered women’s paintings (no longer a perjorative categorization, I hope), since many women have avoided grand themes—as a “form of rebellion,” Greenfield-Sanders says, finding other ways of making sense of the world, and creating other hierarchies of significance, I might add. A er all, “Flower paintings, she says, are not made because you want to do something important.” Pausing, she laughs and asks, “Did anyone really want to paint history paintings?” While I had never asked myself that, in thinking it over, I would, without question, much rather look at a Manet flower painting, a mound of Jean Siméon Chardin strawberries, a Giorgio Morandi still life, or a sunlit field of Greenfield-Sanders’s wildflowers.

Lilly Wei is a New York based art critic, independent curator, writer and journalist whose area of interest is global contemporary art.

Bend in the Road, 2023

Mixed media oil on canvas

51 x 51 inches

129.5 x 129.5 cm

Dunes, 2023

129.54 x 129.54 cm

Mixed media oil on canvas

51 x 51 inches

Lake Beach, 2023

Mixed media oil on canvas

51 x 51 inches

129.54 x 129.54 cm

68 x 68 inches

172.7 x 172.7 cm

Pine Beach, 2023

Mixed media oil on canvas

Pink Wildflowers, 2023

Mixed media oil on canvas

34 x 34 inches

86.4 x 86.4 cm

Pink Wildflowers, 2023

Mixed media oil on canvas

51 x 51 inches

129.5 x 129.5 cm

Red Suit Beach, 2023

Mixed media oil on canvas

68 x 68 inches

172.7 x 172.7 cm

51 x 51 inches

129.54 x 129.54 cm

Umbrella Beach I, 2023

Mixed media oil on canvas

Umbrella Beach II, 2023

Mixed media oil on canvas

51 x 51 inches

129.54 x 129.54 cm

White Tree, 2023

Mixed media oil on canvas

34 x 34 inches

86.4 x 86.4 cm

Wildflower Hill, 2023

Mixed media oil on canvas

34 x 34 inches

86.4 x 86.4 cm

34 x 34 inches

86.4 x 86.4 cm

Field of Flowers, 2024

Mixed media oil on canvas

Mountain Landscape, 2024

Mixed media oil on canvas

68 x 68 inches

172.7 x 172.7 cm

Pink Wildflowers, 2024

Mixed media oil on canvas

52 x 51 inches

132.1 x 129.5 cm

68 x 68 inches

172.7 x 172.7 cm

Seven Trees, 2024

Mixed media oil on canvas

Step Hike, 2024

Mixed media oil on canvas

34 x 34 inches

86.4 x 86.4 cm

Wildflowers and Distant Lake, 2024

Mixed media oil on canvas

68 x 68 inches

172.7 x 172.7 cm

ISCA GREENFIELD-SANDERS: LOOKING BACK AT THE ROAD AHEAD

Linda Yablonsky

I’m in the studio where Isca Greenfield-Sanders makes art. Her apartment is in the same building a few floors down. It’s a walk-up. I’m feeling a li le light in the head, but that may be an effect of the paintings propped around the room. All are square—square in format, that is. Not uncool. Greenfield-Sanders calls them landscapes. I see hallucinations.

This is my first introduction to her work. I need to give it a minute.

Bend in the Road is a mountain scene. It has the look of a million souvenir postcards, but it does not conform to type. In reality, such a road would be a two-lane blacktop. On this canvas, it’s a fuzzy pink. The road curves gently around a hill topped by flamboyant nests of greenery, while the rock face appears to have endured a rain of lava that erupted from the set of Barbie. It’s the color of co on candy.

Daylight floods the area, but the sky is thick with clouds. Off the shoulder on the near side of the road, a grassy slope sprinkled with yellow flowers descends into a thicket of bushes and trees that are as deep a green as any in the Black Forest. Only there is no forest—just treetops in a ravine. Then there is the drone-like view: It’s as if we are looking through the windshield of an airborne car that is hurtling off the road.

I need to catch my breath. Each canvas is another riddle.

Can we discuss Pine Beach? Here, we have a family gathered on a spit of sand before a stand of oddly flowering evergreens. We see a beach chair and a sun umbrella. We see a woman in a blue bathing suit. Yet the only hint of water is the refracted light behind the trees. The beach is on a marsh that is choked by tall pink and green weeds. From our perch in the distance, perhaps from a boat run aground in the muck, the figures are indistinct. Are we sinking?

A raging pink slime blots the reflection of wispy clouds over the remote pond in Cloud Creek. Where is its outlet? We view the crowd on Pink Cloud Beach from an ocean that is drowning us. What about the seven tall trees in the painting of that name? Their trunks, as lean as stalks of asparagus, show signs of spring. The sunlight is as blinding-white as the snow on the ground, which has yet to melt. At least it looks like snow. Or is it a creek? Is what I’m seeing the a ermath of a flood?

These paintings may be studio fantasias, but they’re real enough; people swear that they’ve been to one or another of the sites they depict. Even I thought that the dense field of fuchsia, French blue and pearly white flowers that have grown to my height on a seaside bluff was the view from an abandoned resort I stumbled across one summer in Bermuda.

For some time now, Greenfield-Sanders has been storming the gates of a genre that has long been the province of Sunday painters—hobbyists who take pleasure in achieving verisimilitude. Clearly, that is not her purpose.

This artist is no copyist. The indeterminate locations and questionable viewpoints at play in her paintings are the soul of her project: to render the natural world by dispensing with naturalism. Of course, that hasn’t ma ered so much to art for more than a hundred years. Think Matisse. Actually, as it turns out, Greenfield-Sanders relies on photographs.

They’re not her own. Nor does she li them from the Internet. They come from slides taken by anonymous tourists when cameras still required film.

To hunt for them, Greenfield-Sanders forages in flea markets. She stops at yard sales. She rifles through junk shop bins. From each outing, she brings home crates of random, 35-milimeter slides that were lost or forgo en by travelers pointing cameras at stunning vistas or shooting family vacations. She has thousands of these vernacular images. Most date back seventy years and give evidence to an almost antediluvian world before smartphone screens fla ened it, before climate change sickened it, before industry and megalopolis laid waste to wilderness idealized in song lyrics as purple mountain majesties and amber waves of grain.

As Greenfield-Sanders puts it, “Photography is a poor match for landscapes.” (The ghost of Ansel Adams was not in the room.) Her interest lies in the way photographic mementoes shape experience that time distorts. Memories fade. They conflate. They become a history that is less a record of fact than the stuff of dreams.

The painter’s eye sees farther than a camera. She has the know-how and the tools to manipulate and interpret what the camera captures. Her considerable labors involve a scanner, a computer, and a printer, as well as oil paint, watercolor, paper, canvas, easel, and brushes. The process is complicated. It goes something like this: Pick a slide, scan the photo, “correct” its colors, crop it, rough up its proportions, combine it with details from other scans, print the result, then render it in pencil and watercolor on a small square of paper.

That’s only the beginning.

Make another scan of the painted print, and repeat, adding, fusing, or eliminating figures and other details; alter the scale, the focus, and the light; print an enlargement. Repeat. Next, paint studies on a modestly sized canvas to see how it all gels. Go back to the scan. Enlarge the image once again, then move to a much larger canvas. Paste on the paper prints with a slight overlap to create a visible grid. Embellish the prints with oils. When there is no way to distinguish a brushstroke from its facsimile, when the eye can hardly discern where a trace of the original photograph remains, the process is complete, the painting done.

What you get is a splendid mash-up of its lineage: the perspectival illusionism of Renaissance picture-making and the windowpane structure of a Gilbert & George light box. What you get is a credible painting that is proud to show its seams. It’s like dressing in layers, each obscuring and revealing what came before -- but only when the viewer is present. Reproductions vacate meaning and texture. Paint and print become indivisible. Gridlines disappear.

Greenfield-Sanders holds her pale e to just five colors, with allowances for shading. If her environments feel removed from ordinary life, it’s because they are uninterrupted by commercial signage, oil rigs, shopping malls, data centers, missile silos, or even farms; for the most part, they are unmolested by either animals or people. They are places time forgot. They are prehistory. They are everywhere and nowhere at once, and yet they are downright specific—untamed lands that nobody owns and anyone can claim.

Greenfield-Sanders, who was born and raised in New York with artists on both sides of her family, is the daughter of a portrait photographer who had a darkroom at home. From the age of ten, she could shoot, develop, and print her own pictures, but childhood visits to museums were what determined her future as a painter.

She cites Winslow Homer and J.M.W. Turner as early inspirations, but the artist that her own works recall is Thomas Cole. The seven monumental paintings in his predictive Course of Empire cycle illustrate what happens to an arcadia when people compelled by war and avarice clear, pollute, drain, and restrict its pristine territories by introducing toxic waste, massive construction, and ruthless competition, all in the name of civilized progress.

Greenfield-Sanders is 45, married to another artist, and the mother of two children. Other artists today share her concerns over human exploitation of the planet in very different ways. Alexis Rockman and Walton Ford are two, and their painted commentaries are acute, but they stick to traditional techniques of painting that Greenfield-Sanders rejects. She looks forward by digging into a past she never knew and reimagining the present. It has lakes frozen in the ice age that are

Winslow Homer, Flower Garden and Bungalow, Bermuda, 1899, Watercolor and graphite on off-white wove paper, 13 15/16 x 20 15/16 inches (35.4 x 53.2 cm)

yet to be discovered. It has ord-like reservoirs that no population will tap. These enigmas are not grim or frightening. The agony of their existence is beauty.

The slides that are her raw materials date back to the era when cars came in bright colors and had chrome and big fins. In that period, President Lyndon B. Johnson, at the urging of his First Lady, pressured Congress into passing the 1965 Highway Beautification Act. Lady Bird Johnson campaigned across the country to encourage the prohibition of outdoor advertising on interstate and other federally funded highways, stamp out li er, and enhance new roads with variegated plantings.

I think of Lady Bird when I see Mountain Landscape, another pastel roadway in a remote Alpine region. The landscape is unperturbed by human intervention, except for the hot pink roadster heading toward an oncoming vehicle. Like the young couple who have stopped in their tracks to stare, either in alarm or wonderment, at a skyward event beyond the scope of Step Hike, the

cars look tiny in the majesty of their surroundings—as if they were adorable toys instead of gasguzzlers about to collide.

“Landscapes,” Greenfield-Sanders says, “teach us how small we humans are.”

And how far we reach.

When I leave her studio, my mind turns to a country road in upstate New York. Its five-mile length winds through woodlands to a lake in view of the Berkshire Mountains. There is not a single billboard or cell tower on the route. On maps, it’s County Road 11, but a er it won a national contest in 1969, people in the area adopted a new name for it: The Beauty Highway.

I have traveled this road. It is not pre ier than many other roads in the area, nor does it even vaguely resemble any that Isca Greenfield-Sanders has painted.

I would send her a picture, but who uses film anymore, anyway?

Linda Yablonsky is an art critic, novelist, and culture reporter based in New York. Over thirty years’ time, her byline has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times and T Magazine, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, W, and Art News, as well as on such digital platforms as Artforum.com and Bloomberg. She contributes exhibition reviews and a monthly column, New York Insider, to The Art Newspaper and is writing a biography of the artist Jeff Koons.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

ISCA GREENFIELD-SANDERS

WILDFLOWER PATH

16 MAY – 3 JULY 2024

Miles McEnery Gallery 515 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

Publication © 2024 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved

Essay © 2024 Lilly Wei Essay © 2024 Linda Yablonsky

Publications and Archival Associate Julia Schlank, New York, NY

Photography by Dan Bradica, New York, NY

Christopher Burke Studios, New York, NY

Catalogue layout by Allison Leung

ISBN: 979-8-3507-3116-3

Cover: Mountain Landscape, (detail), 2024