BIO: Born in New York City, Sandy Litchfield received her BFA from the University of Colorado and an MFA from UMass Amherst. She has received public art commissions from the Metropolitan Transit Authority (NYC MTA) and Public Art for Public Schools in the Bronx, which was recognized by Americans for the Arts, Public Art Network. Notable residencies include The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, the American Academy in Rome Visiting Artist Residency, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been exhibited at numerous museums, including the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, the Portland Art Museum, and the Fitchburg Art Museum. Litchfield is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she teaches art, architecture, design, and writing.

STATEMENT: Landscape is never a neutral backdrop; it is the medium through which perception, memory, and belonging take form. My paintings test the edges of this encounter, drawing from theories of landscape as cultural construct (Mitchell), phenomenology of place (Casey), and the ineffable “qualia” of lived experience, the felt textures of perception that elude capture. They seek to hold what Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet describes as the strangeness of being both inside and outside oneself, an intimacy with place that is also a perpetual longing.

Landscape has always been charged with this doubleness. I grew up in New York State, moving between NYC, the Adirondack mountains, and the suburban waters of Long Island Sound. Traveling and dwelling in these environments shaped my sense of belonging as porous and plural: place as solace, place as loss, place as return; a fragile archive of relation.

My paintings unfold slowly, over weeks and months. I work from photographs, sketches on site, digital renderings, along with layers of pigment, erasure, and revisions. This duration resists the instantaneous capture of the snapshot or screen. Surfaces carry memory, emphasizing shifts in light, atmosphere, and mood. The final work is not a depiction of place, but a durational trace of being-with place and self; a visual record of encounters that sediment into color and line.

Materially, the paintings oscillate between precision and dissolution. Deliberate line work anchors passages of vibrant color that verge on abstraction. Light moves across the surface as a kind of weather- sometimes vaporous, sometimes electric. The sensibility edges toward the romantic, but is inflected with playful pop; an awareness of the constructedness of vision even as it reaches toward immersion.

What emerges, I hope, is not landscape as backdrop but as interlocutor: places rendered as companions whose presence demands response. Each painting is an offering to the intricacy of devotion and the expansiveness of awe—a way of acknowledging the fragile, intimate reciprocity between self and world.

sandy@sandylitchfield.com  |  413.687.9619