Ocean Eyes of Blue

There is a familiarity that you cannot help but encounter when you glance upon a painting by Isca Greenfield-Sanders; a thinly veiled memory that diffuses each work, drawing you toward a recognised place or moment, just outside of reach. Where to locate this memory is a question that gently hovers, as you ponder how the artist has crafted these exquisite images.

It is in the hues and dominant spectrums of Kodachrome colour that our first clue to the origin of each image lightly surfaces; evidencing the profound and joyous influence that amateur photography has impressed on the artist’s life’s work. It is not a coincidence that Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ first Australian exhibition is showing at a contemporary photographic gallery. In fact, her entire painting practice is wedded to the light based medium.

Isca Greenfield-Sanders commences each new exhibition by consulting her archive of collected negatives and slides, mostly dated from the 1950’s and 60’s. Acquired from markets and auction lots, these once-forgotten relics are photographic accounts of middle-class America, captured by unknown photographers who occasionally struggled to operate their cameras. While firmly concerned with the nostalgic agency attached to analogue photography, Greenfield-Sanders’ work is directed solely through a painterly lens.

The aesthetics of amateur photography has, over decades, informed and underpinned the visuals of Greenfield-Sanders’ painting work, which occurs in cross-disciplinary stages in the artists New York studio. Beginning with a digital collage framework of multiple found photographs, images are delicately rendered in watercolour and colour pencil. This process sees a once distant and anonymous photographic moment receive a contemporary revival, brought into current discussion through dozens of hours of highly skilled painting work.

The artist’s large scale oil paintings on canvas (held in distinguished public collections such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, Brooklyn Museum, NY, Victoria and Albert Museum, UK) are directly informed by their parent watercolour studies, and are the final stage in a series of protracted studio processes. The binding element that threads this three-stage process- found, domestic photography- is by this stage diffused by a filter of three artistic mediums, drawing wonderful parallels to the rogue memories petitioned by these striking works of art.

Ocean Eyes of Blue was Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ first Australian exhibition. The artist lives and works in New York.