TEXT BY MICHAELA MULLIN | VIEW IMAGES
In New Directions, Sarah Grant has been thinking about vitality, abundance, security, and more. And she’s been painting it all. With small-scale paper works and large-scale canvases, Grant has created a new body of work that makes us hungry for life. In the process of freeing herself from what has come before, she’s leapt into the joyful present tense, and her work manifests an even more honest presence. Inspired by travels, world events, and the abstracted and realistic ways the world is seen, Grant activates her expansive palette through loose line and stroke, depicting a world in motion—volatile, but always vital.
This exhibit can be broken down into multiple series—with outliers. Because painting in the outland is Grant’s best new endeavor: acknowledging, creating, and (re)connecting a distance between the old and the new.
From the aerial heights of an airplane, Grant looked down upon a stormy paradise, a holiday takeoff and landing that ingrained its mapped contours into her memory. From these, she has painted “Caye,” “Ambergris,” and “Sunset.” From islands and fragrance, to the bringing forth of another cycle, Grant elucidates disparate yet cohabitating elements.
“Canyonland Fog” and “Red Rocks” harken back to her childhood and recent revisits of wide-open spaces in the United Sates. History is not nostalgia in the hands of Grant; she revitalizes memory, place, and event, acknowledging what came before while standing firmly amidst contemporary affairs. The natural shifts of the land awe and haunt her, but she is concerned with continuation, and assists with this by preserving the changes here on canvas.
The representational rears its beautiful leaning in “Shore Lunch,” “Morocco,” and “Bonfire Birthday.” These smaller works are reminders that still life and snapshot scenic paintings brought her joy in the past, and she has circled back to them with accumulated experience and challenges to herself as artist, The whole fish, head and all; the tagine; the burning logs—these are all referential objects that Grant understands, in the daily and life at large, can also be reverential.
“Swashbucklers”, “Moving the Goods,” and “Night Shift” enforce her connection to nature. The realism continues in these three works on paper, likening the processes of wildlife to an interesting (but still fallible, sadly) Fordism. Industry is first and foremost the realm of the natural world, and Grant never ceases to seize an opportunity to tell its stories.
Grant flexes different muscles in her large-scale canvases: “Frontier,” “The Fourth,” and “Pink Moon”. Fortitude and reflection should always go together as well as they align in these paintings, where weather is a primary subject—making, moving, and obfuscating what occurs above, below, and upon a horizon. “The Fourth” is timeless and timely, celebrating a memory of Independence Day celebrations, the night’s colors swirling as smoke from fireworks. Discernable forms, a boat and a building, can be gleaned—but it is the flag at the very top center, that has no outline or boundaries to contain its stripes and blue canton, which draws the eye best, in search of stars.
The meditative outliers are just another strength Grant exercises. “Tender Land” and “Vine, Fig, and Cherry Blossoms” are calming works in their minimal presence. “Tender Land” reverberates with a peachy glow, appearing both embedded and emanating from the canvas. The cerulean and magenta waves pull in different directions, first fixating the eye and then inviting it to move as if surveying a large bloom.
“Vine, Fig, and Cherry Blossoms” might be Grant’s most personal (let us not forget that the “personal” often carries with it the forward slash, followed by “political”). She is thinking about Biblical passages and symbols. The first titular items were also known to be spoken frequently by the first president of our United States. With each gesture in this work, Grant is attempting to conjure peace, prosperity, and an ever-hopeful rebirth. This is an historically cyclical and heartfelt excursion of hope. The painting is awash with open space, exposing the raw canvas as a quiet background, its sky blue coming through but barely touching the contours of twigs, leaves, and figs in the upper left quadrant. Grant asks the viewer to travel the canvas with its vined arches, a repetition of thresholds we may traverse.
Don’t miss this exquisite exhibit, New Directions, on view through Friday, July 19.
Exhibit Images
