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:

Pessoa writes that the true landscapes are those that we ourselves create, and that since we are their gods, we see them as they really are. I’ve never found a better description for why I love making landscapes. My paintings gather from photographs, drawings, memory, and digital sketches, revised across weeks or even months until something clicks into place that I can only call rightness; a threshold of color and composition that the work either reaches or doesn’t. The criterion is felt before it is understood. I look for paintings that pull you somewhere you haven’t been, but still recognize; landscapes that feel both invented and inevitable. The places I live and know, particularly New England and the Adirondacks, are not only my subject but also my pretext. In the studio, they get transformed: flattened, heightened, compressed into color relationships and spatial geometries that owe something to both maps and the history of landscape representation. Romantic. Yes, sometimes. But also pop, playful, even electric.

I like to think of landscape not so much as a backdrop to experience, but as something we are always already inside of, something we tend to and return to, and that eventually becomes us. Painting and drawing are a way of tracing what it feels like to be held by my favorite places, to long for them, to reconstruct them from the inside out. Like Pessoa, I am always looking for “the other thing that shines at the bottom of all longing like a possible diamond in a cave one cannot reach.” It’s this peculiar ache of loving something you know you will be leaving, or have already left. Color is where that feeling goes. Composition is where it finds its shape.

sandy@sandylitchfield.com  |  413.687.9619