I need a new word.The problem with using words like “collage” or “painting” or “mixed-media” to describe Isca Greenfield-Sanders’s works is that they don’t convey, not really, what she’s doing with oil paint, archival photography, watercolor, gouache, and colored pencil. Their straightforward presentation and familiar subject matter belie the complexity of production and wealth of art historical and literary references.

In Greenfield-Sanders’s paintings that are more than paintings, we find meditations on ways images perform and construct meaning, the legacy of landscape painting, the phenomenology of memory, the latent feminism of botanical illustrations, and both the political and personal significance of attending to the physical world. As is the case with nature, whether it’s your neighbor’s late-blooming delphiniums or the glinting spectacle of afternoon sun raking across a bucolic lake, the closer attention you pay to Greenfield-Sanders’s sanguine colored compositions, the more you see. Here, the gratifications of looking dilate continuously.

And there’s much to see. In her exhibition, Cut from a Dream, at Berggruen Gallery, there are footprint-flecked beaches, the indigo of distance on piney peaks, wind-swept waves chiming with light, rough rocky bluffs, the fuchsia-violet-coral petals of wild red clovers, bathing suit-clad children at play, lacey layers of precipitation on delicate foliage, and sun-bleached lighthouses. 

The idyllic alpine and seashore landscapes appear at first like stills from a classic movie, amalgams of vintage advertisements, or postcards from someone else’s dream. But stand before one, and suddenly you may find the details from a family holiday you took when you were 6, filling in the features on the otherwise vague faces, the lucent pink shells scattered about the shore, and conjuring the feeling of wet sand yielding beneath bare feet, the sharp announcement of salt on the back of your tongue. Just as Marcel Proust describes in his famous passage on madeleines, after the initial flash of recognition, the remainder of the memory fills in slowly, coalescing at last like a photograph in a developing tray.

Photography is, literally and metaphorically, at the center of Greenfield-Sanders’s practice, a fact that’s unsurprising, considering she grew up with a darkroom in her house. Born and raised in the East Village in New York City, her father was a portrait photographer, and her grandfather was a first-generation abstract expressionist painter. She split her time between her father’s in-home studio, where she fell in love with his large-format box camera, and her grandfather’s, a few blocks away, where she began watercolor lessons at age 8. “Only once I was able to sit an hour or so for a portrait would he teach me,” Greenfield-Sanders says. “It was his way of discerning whether I had the temperament, the sensibility of an artist.”

Four decades later, it appears that her grandfather’s assessment was correct: Greenfield-Sanders continues to visit her studio daily, still creating paintings and photographs. Her practice synthesizes the two disciplines, combining their respective materials—oils and watercolor, film and paper—tools—brushes and easels, computers and scanners—and techniques—perspectival illusionism, chiaroscuro and viewfinder, light boxes. Although her relationship with her camera has evolved over the years, while she initially drew upon archival imagery, she is now drawing on her own photographs, which she meticulously selects as the first step in her labor-intensive process. “One way you could think about [my] work is that I make paintings about photography,” she says.

Among the thousands of vintage 35-millimeter slides she regularly sifts through, mainly featuring poorly staged images of cakes, graduations, and couples on vacation, she looks for scenes that are in dialogue with her medium’s tradition. Having something of the enduring and universal about them, such scenes, despite their specificity—capturing a single moment in a single life—make possible a flash of recognition for the viewer, even now, however many decades later. “I’m drawn to bathers, flowers, and idyllic landscapes,” she says. “They allow me to think about and engage with the history of painting, individual painters I admire, their work, and their lives,” she says. Among the most influential: Clara Peeters, the Flemish still-life painter; Mary Delaney, an English botanical artist known for her novel “paper-mosaiks;” and J. M. W. Turner, the English Romantic artist renowned as “the painter of light.”

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She then edits a single photo or collages multiple photos together into one composite image using computer software. That image is printed, then reimagined and refined using pencil, watercolor, and gouache, each medium shaping the composition in a distinctive way: the watercolor, for example, softens focus, while the pencil defines it. This process is repeated until she identifies a study she’d like to transfer to canvas. Printed in tiles that form the grid underlying the finished image, the paper is then affixed and sealed on top of the large-scale canvas. Finally, she renders the last layer in transparent and semi- transparent oil paints. In a sequence that also recalls the construction of memory—adeptly joining content to form—evidence of the work’s stratiform composition emerges little by little from the oil-slick surface: the margins around the paper, the raised interlocking edges of the tiles, the washes of watercolor.

Like peering into a limpid pond, it’s possible to see into the resulting paintings, where flourishes of watercolor, penciled gestures, and even pixels from the original archival film are illuminated as if by shafts of passing sunlight. It’s this illusory depth that lends her depictions of bodies of water and wildflower meadows their tessellating, animated quality. The blazing white light atop the pockmarked waves in “Aerial Beach” (2024) shifts as it would with the falling and swelling tide, in and out, in and out. In “Pink Wildflower Field” (2025), wind undulates each mottled petal, furrowed leaf, and arched stem until they merge in the background so that the underbrush appears to unfurl infinitely toward and beyond the rising peak.

The mesmerizing ongoingness in many of her paintings elicits a somatic yearning to be floating in the ocean or enveloped by a meadow. In contrast to the legacy of landscape painters who privileged explicit representations that supported acts of possession or situated nature as a force to be dominated and subdued, Greenfield-Sanders embraces the evanescent and Edenic. The jouissance, or sense of bliss, inherent in the interplay among plants, sky, water, land, and light, is buoyed by her intricate details and dynamic variations of tonal contrast. Integrating new technologies with inherited methods, employing colors reflective of current aesthetic sensibilities, such as Opera Pink, and responding to the urgency of our evolving sociopolitical challenges, lends the work its resonance.

Greenfield-Sanders’ decision to monumentalize what Emily Dickinson might call the “career of flowers” on enormous canvases speaks both to an environmental reverence and social responsibility: “I spend most of my time in silence, noticing the things around me,” she says. “Not everyone has the ability or luxury to do that, so I think it’s incumbent on the people who do to show others that yes, something as small as a wildflower is worth slowing down for. Yes, nature and beauty are worth attending to.”

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