ISCA GREENFIELD-SANDERS: Wildflower Path

"These paintings, as in the past, appear to spill over with colors but she uses only a handful, she said (quinacridones, ultramarine blues, viridians, terre verte, aureolins, preferring translucent hues). There are also no blacks here, and no nocturnal vistas. If these works are not always about morning in America, they are never about night, since she is more interested in exploring and capturing the interplay of daylight and color on water, beach, fields, earth, trees, say, constantly exploring new ways to portray that. Her work wheels through time, seasons, and weather, deftly summoning the transparent hues of early morning or the diffused light of an overcast 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 often, the paintings are dominated by the blues of skies, lakes, seas, distant mountains, and of shadows."

- Lilly Wei in "Blue Skies"

"Greenfield-Sanders holds her palette 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."

- Linda Yablonsky in "Isca Greenfield-Sanders: Looking Back at the Road Ahead"

"Eventually, she started by sourcing her content from 1950s and 1960s photographs, not surprising since she grew up with the medium. Taken by anonymous amateur photographers, she buys them in large lots, then eagerly rummages through them in search of images she finds compelling, almost all of them commemorating moments and places in mid-century lives. They are prompts to memory and shape the way we remember the past, a blend, no doubt, of truth and fiction. Although they are constructions and not real places, she is often asked to identify the scene she has painted, those inquiring insisting 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 the viewer to insert their personal memories into it."

"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 gas-guzzlers about to collide.

 

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

 

And how far we reach."