Isca Greenfield-Sanders: Looking Back at the Road Ahead By 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 little light in the head, but that may be an effect of the paintings propped around the room. All are square – square in format, this 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 rockface appears to have endured a [...]

Blue Skies By LILLY WEI Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ new body of paintings looks much like her previous work. It is centered on landscapes of such glowing beauty that it might restore our once held belief that God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world, although it’s 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 welcomed because so rare these days, in Greenfield-Sanders’ steadiness of vision that is (literally) blue-skied and upbeat, both nostalgic and timeless, the world of her imagination poised delicately, gracefully adjacent to the world that exists, a world increasingly threatened with extinction due to our own self-destructive follies. Her sense of nature is not that of the Romantic sublime; rather, she views it from a more benign, non-adversarial, feminist-inflected perspective. She prefers a less overwhelming intention and scale, often populating her [...]

Points of View By Phyllis Tuchman               Isca Greenfield-Sanders’s figured landscapes¹ transport viewers to light-dappled lakes, mountain trails, rustic sites where wild flowers bloom, and ocean shores bounded by sandy beaches and sunny skies. These are well-trodden places that people like to visit. Often, they appear to be startingly familiar. You might feel that you have already been there—or to somewhere very similar. There’s her noteworthy palette to consider, too. It’s unobtrusive. Though you immediately notice how this third-generation artist² occasionally swaddles her scenic vistas in pinks or blues, you probably remain unaware that she also practices restraint. She doesn’t overload her canvases with lots of different colors.                  As it is, Greenfield-Sanders upends our notions of how landscape artists proceed. She is not a plein air painter. She does not sketch, let alone create watercolors, in front [...]

Painting in Parallel by DANIEL KEHLMANN I was lucky to discover the work of Isca and Sebastian simultaneously. It struck me immediately how much they talk to each other in their work, one centering nature and the other human beings. When I look at the paintings of Isca Greenfield-Sanders I often see beautiful, expansive landscapes, sometimes inhabited by tiny human silhouettes. But rather than being lost, overwhelmed or threatened by the powers of nature, they seem protected and at home. Nature isn’t hostile to them, and they are not hostile towards nature. Rather, nature comes to the fore as the majestic healing entity, quite literally, as well as spiritually. Isca’s work seems a reminder of the old idea that we have to inhabit the world, have to be in it, a part of it, because we are of the world, even though we don’t entirely belong there. There is a [...]

Open Window: On Isca Greenfield-Sanders's Grids By KRIS PAULSEN A mountain, a beach, a turbulent sky; canoes sneaking across a lake at night; a helicopter high above treetops, caught just before leaving the frame; bathers spied on from above: These are fragments, images pulled out of context and stilled from the flow of time. Their framing, angles, and depth of field all speak the language of photography and the mathematical discipline and distancing enforced by the lens. The moments they preserve are ripe with reportage, contingency, and—simultaneously—a certain familiarity wrought by amateurism and the automation of capture. Content tethers them securely to the vernacular idioms of the documentation of middle-class family life. One can easily imagine seeing them click into view during a living-room slide show that distills the history of a life to its special moments. Yet, in this act of committing to the archive and official memory, these [...]