When I first saw Sandy Litchfield’s paintings in the Marsh Gallery in Fayerweather I was confused at best, I couldn’t find a recognizable form of the human or natural kind in any of her works. But I didn’t think of her work as being abstract—I suppose I was challenged by her imagery and the colors she used, they were impervious to on the spot analysis. I went to her lecture a couple of days later and really got a chance to see exactly how her work came to be as it is. Her work as we see it now was first inspired by daily afternoon walks she takes to this very day. She began painting fairly realist paintings of the natural environment she encountered. She was dissatisfied with the result and wanted to capture her actual experience of walking through the woods and decided to use a grid system that collaged together all of the different perspectives she had while walking. Although her work is still influenced by this collage work she began seeing the landscape in more fluid shapes.

An interest in geological models and ancient maps inspired her to see the landscape as a cross section and to see the natural land formations head on even while painting from a bird’s eye view. Maps for centuries were an inventions or works of art after all, since there was no way of getting a bird’s eye view. She also began looking at Japanese ink landscapes and was influenced by the artist’s use of negative space to suggest and outline positive space. From her experience with this type of art she dealt with a tension between seeing the landscape from above and from within the space itself.

Litchfield started a diary of her daily walks, but instead of verbally accounting for her experience, she drew quick images of everything she’d remembered from the trail all in one cohesive shape. She edited these sketches added color, enlarged them, collaged on Mylar and pieces of digital photos and began airbrushing on details. She experimented with wall installations often curving her images into corners and around walls edges. She now integrates the human figure to reflect her own experience of being physically lost within the landscape and the tension between discovering life and the self in the landscape as well as a fear of earth in so far as it represents burial and death. Lichtifield described that lately her work has diverged away from her walks as she becomes more interested in fictional landscapes (although I think the importance of memory to her paintings of her walks would have made them fictional anyway). The experience of the walk is now just a take off point—she is less interested in capturing the reality of the walk. Litchfield’s new art suggests something about the presence of the figure in the human landscape—she is optimistic about the human capability to be in touch with the natural environment, to weather its ebbs and flows and learn something from the environmental crisis we’re in about how to treat our natural environment from now on. Her varied interest and influence and “message” if it can be called that result in images unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. The images are entirely unique and I feel like I’d recognize her work anywhere. What we see today are micro and macro views of the landscape, the landscape is seen in a cross section as well as from under the earth and looking down at it from above. We see the path progress while experiencing it holistically. The shapes seem to spill over or to be spilled–the splatter and fragment, and yet still see cohesion, they remain connected and composed. They inspire a visceral reaction and still draw the viewer in to their undulations of detail and anthropomorphic shapes. They require a close look. Check it out if you get a chance. There are fewer than 20 pieces in the gallery and might be of interest to anyone who thought they hated landscape painting. I promise these aren’t your usual landscapes. Litchfield’s work, again, is in the Eli Marsh Gallery on the first floor of Fayerweather until October 17^th. The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 9:00 am until 4:00 pm and Saturday- Sunday from 1 pm to 5 pm.