Keep Them Still By ADAM GOPNIK The first impression of Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ paintings is one of simple, intense visual pleasure, which is made deeper by the emotional accessibility of the scenes. A spare monochrome exquisiteness, lit by sudden flares of a single bright color (a dark red bathing suit on a pale green sand dune, a pink hat against a harmony of blue sky, sea blues, and bright composite whites) is her signature style. The aerated elegance of her surfaces may recall Milton Avery; her concentration on the single, plaintive isolated figure may recall Edward Hopper. Hers is an austere figurative style, sweetly touched by nostalgia and by longing. We recognize the bright light of an unspecified beach, somewhere in Maine or in a (then) unspoiled Bridgehampton or Cape Cod. It is a 1962 world still pre–logo and not so much prelapsarian as pre-lapse—before the errors of mass branding. The [...]

Painting the Shifting Sands of Memory by STACEY GOERGEN Isca Greenfield-Sanders describes herself as a landscape painter, and at first blush, her luminous paintings and drawings are easily interpreted as the romantic compositions this characterization recalls. Her canvases seem vaguely recognizable, tugging at the viewer's memory. They include people outdoors, often in scenes by the water or engaging in leisure activities, recalling a collective consciousness that at once seems specific, but by definition is very general. By understanding her working process and theoretical explorations, these landscapes can be better framed in a conceptual context. Examining the relationship of photography to painting, she refers to the passing of time, and the dissolution of film photography's image making as a rarified, time-consuming, and relatively expensive proposition, while simultaneously equating this transition to memory itself. In a world where the proliferation of images is facilitated by technology and digital media, what is the [...]

Isca Greenfield-Sanders: The Silent Glow of Light by LIV STOLZ In her work, Isca Greenfield-Sanders interweaves photography and painting. This mix poses many intriguing questions about the practice and development of photography in the post-digital era, as well as painting’s history and its contemporary practice. These two parallel lines of inquiry intertwine as the main thread running throughout her work. I will treat both discourses in their relevant contexts. Greenfield-Sanders’ latest series Film Edge Paintings is her most abstract to date, but in many ways they are a consistent step in her progression from the more figurative painting of her previous series. She finds the raw material for her work in rolls of tossed out 35mm film and negatives, which she finds in flea markets, and then transforms them into oil paintings. In her studio, the painting process is involved and complex. She scans the photographs, prints them on rice paper, [...]

Isca Greenfield-Sanders Light Leaks by NORA BURNETT ABRAMS Your paintings are typically based on found photographs. Why do you begin with photography? Some artists work from imagination, some from life, some from film stills, but these days I find that the use of photography by painters is universal. One thing that distinguishes my work from others is that I include photography as a subject of my inquiry. I view the photographic image as raw data that I am translating from one medium (photography) to another (painting.) I marshal many available techniques and media, but fundamentally I am making oil paintings. The contrast between the ubiquity of photography and the rarity of painting fascinates me. What makes a photograph ripe for you? Choosing an image is a very rapid process for me. I paint from photographs that speak more about the history of art than they do the specifics of their [...]

Foreword to the Light Leaks Catalogue From the MCA Denver by ADAM LERNER I often think about the words Pierre Bonnard wrote in a note to his friend Henri Matisse: “My work is not going too badly and I dream of seeking the Absolute.” I love the way Bonnard shifts so seamlessly from ho-hum conversational banterto the biggest thing imaginable. I like that he embeds a message about thetotality of all phenomena visible and invisible in a message akin to the kind ofdaily report a guy might give his wife: “Work was fine today, honey.” This wasan artist who, years after his wife had died, made paintings showing her taking abath. Bonnard depicted the everyday, but he was always searching for somethingthat transcended time. The same impulse strikes in the work of Isca Greenfield-Sanders, an artist who presents mundane instances from ordinary life and makesthem feel universal. Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ paintings [...]

In the Air by TRINIE DALTON “It’s hard to make a painting right now without thinking of war,” Isca Greenfield-Sanders says of her painting series, Against the Fall. Employing her signature manipulation of vintage images, these new works depict single parachutists floating through the air or men huddled in groups learning to be paratroopers. Based on two sets of military parachuting slides circa 1942 and 1962, the paintings point to the wars of those decades—WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The show’s title is taken from the direct translation of the French word parachute. PARA (Against) and CHUTE (the Fall) connotes an artistic resistance to political ruin. Leavened by the artist’s formal interest in interpolating photography through painting, Greenfield-Sanders’ “parachute paintings” urge the viewer to acknowledge current politics through subject matter. Recent American survey exhibitions have sought to examine an artistic move away from a display of materialistic [...]

A Conversation Chuck Close and Isca Greenfield-Sanders CC: Let’s start at the beginning. Did you start out as a straight photographer? IGS: No, I’ve never been a photographer. Of course, my father is and I grew up having a darkroom in the house, but I was always more interested in painting. CC: Where did you go to school? IGS: Brown University where I double majored in painting and math. CC: They are mutually exclusive as far as I’m concerned. IGS: (laughs) I actually think that each discipline helped me with the other one. Math taught me to have a regimented step-by-step mind but my creativity pushed me to think outside the box. As a painter, without a method or plan of attack the lack of rules are overwhelming. CC: I don’t even know the multiplication tables. IGS: Really? CC: I can’t add six and seven in my head. I have [...]

Isca Greenfield-Sanders "Paintings for Harley" Baldwin Gallery, 2005 New York artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders presents “Paintings for Harley”, a new series of oil paintings and mixed-media watercolors that create a dialogue between painting and photography. Continuing her method of appropriating imagery from anonymous, discarded family snapshots, the artist explores memory and experience, in a tribute to the late Harley Baldwin. Inspired by two photos selected from her vast pictorial archives, she chooses incidental figures from the compositions’ backgrounds, rather than investigating the primary subjects. In the past, Greenfield-Sanders sutured together elements from several different compositions, engineering fictional scenes. Her new approach is nearly the opposite: mining one image for all of its inherent possibilities. Strangers walking along the beach represent a universal anonymity. Previously, the artist used the signature colors of photography, with saturated red, green and black hues. Now, she employs delicate pinks, yellows, and other mid-tones, shifting to a [...]

Isca Greenfield-Sanders: Grids by NUIT BANAI In carefully crafted scenes of family idylls, Isca Greenfield-Sanders evokes a nostalgia-saturated world of picnics on freshly cut grass, crystal waters of backyard pools and afternoons on sun-drenched beaches This is a world of eternal beauty where boys and girls in colorful bathing suits frolic without care and light and shadow gently play on the rippling surface of perfectly calibrated waves. Collected from the personal archives of family estates, these images capture the hazy memory of a perfect moment in time. In that instant, they reassure us that life has always been this good. All we need to do is resign ourselves to dreaming. Yet, surfacing within this apparent tranquility is the modernist myth of the grid, a cognitive structure that creates and constructs a bold interplay of serendipitous contradictions. The grid’s singularity is that it allows contradictions to maintain themselves within the consciousness [...]