TRANSFORMATIVE TEXTS: ON LAURA SANDERS’ HER HABITAT

CONTEMPORARY ART MATTERS, JUNE 2024

By Maggie Smith

I have admired Laura Sanders for many years. Admired seems like too sterile a word, given the way I feel when I take in her work. There is so much poetry in her paintings: the lacy shade of tree branches and leaves on a woman’s face, the ripples in the water, the light.

It’s enchantment more than simple admiration.

One of the aspects of her work that I’ve always admired—been enchanted by—is her devotion to the natural world and her depictions of women in landscapes. In many of these paintings, women, often a young woman or girls, are not only in “nature,” but alone there. I place nature in quotation marks, because Sanders’ work also poses the question, “What is nature?” Is it something we go retreat into for solace or pleasure, or something we are surrounded by and living in? And who has access to the natural world? What kind of privilege does it require or assume?

There is a sense of vulnerability in these paintings, seeing women alone in a remote area. What are the implied risks and limitations? As women we are conditioned to be wary, always taking in our surroundings, monitoring situations for potential threats. The recent discussion of men vs. bears and the many resulting memes are proof enough. Why would so many women rather encounter a bear in the woods than a man? Any woman who walks or runs alone, or who hikes or swims alone, knows the answer to that question.

But Sanders doesn’t present women or girls as helpless in her work. Look: one may be reaching for a rock, or holding a whistle, empowered to protect herself. One is shielding her eyes from the sun to get a better look around. There is a tension between the implied risk and the freedom and autonomy of being alone in the natural landscape.

There is a meta aspect to her paintings that I relate to as a writer, because I foreground craft and process in my own work. I want to show my thinking on the page, not just the result of my thinking. Despite the realism of her work, Sanders doesn’t want the paintings be so realistic that you forget the medium. She consciously shows the brushstrokes. “Brushstrokes are my words,” Sanders said, when I visited her studio. Sanders is particular about how the paint is laid down—the physicality of paint is the language she uses.

Looking at her work, I never forget that there is a thinking, feeling human being behind it. The creative force behind these paintings is deeply concerned and attuned, but also witty and self-aware. We get a look into Sanders’ perspective and ethos in “Girl with Bottled Water,” a painting that grapples with climate grief with a wry nod to El Greco; the girl looks up like a saint, her eyes brimming with tears. The mylar balloon in “Cloud Formation” references Warhol’s Silver Clouds.

What a gift, to get up close, to see the texture and technique, to “read” these paintings in her particular language and take in all they have to say about history, ecology, feminism, freedom, and imagination. And like poems, these paintings are transformative texts. We can’t spend time with them and not be changed.

— Maggie Smith