Brian Slattery Photos
The works in “Portals and Memories” — up now at City Gallery on Upper State Street through April 25 — are, on one level, simply the latest series of paintings by artist Joyce Greenfield, done in the past two-and-a-half months. On another level, however, they represent a breakthrough, for Greenfield, to a new way of making art.
“None of them came from any intention. I didn’t approach them with an idea in mind,” Greenfield said of the paintings in the show. “I needed to paint, and I was in the pandemic funk.” She began by turning to older paintings she’d made on canvases she’d had for a while — paintings she’d stopped working on but had been dissatisfied with. As she began to work with them, she said, “I could see things underneath the old paint. They started talking to me. And now there’s no stopping me.”
She also found herself working on a series of completely abstract paintings. “They weren’t hard to do. They were so spontaneous, which was great fun…. I often sketch before I paint,” but “these have a life of their own. It felt like a miracle — after all these years of struggling to find the voice.”
Greenfield established herself decades ago in New Haven and beyond as a representational painter, albeit one who was particularly drawn to the effects of light and the possible feelings that could be evoked with it. She has painted interiors, landscapes, ships at harbor, storms at sea, houses along a shoreline. “I would use the buildings” and other subjects “as a foil,” a way to explore with paint the way light worked on her eye and on her mind. “I’m fascinated by color and its interactions,” she said. But the work “wasn’t as spontaneous — I would know what I wanted, and then I would work toward that goal.” The paintings were representational to the point where “you could recognize where it was” if you had been there in life.
But Greenfield, naturally, wasn’t totally satisfied with every painting she made, and a few months ago, she revisited some of those old canvases and found something new in them. “I started wiping things out to make it more of a memory.” One painting, for instance, is “a memory of a place I love.” The room in the painting happened to be of the studio on Monhegan Island where she painted before the pandemic. Under her transformations, it became a portrait of her memory of it — all the more poignant in the context of the pandemic, which made that room inaccessible to her, even as her memories of painting there receded into the past. She knew that whenever she got back there, it wouldn’t be the same — her or the place. “You can’t go back,” she said. “You can’t expect it to be what you remember.”
“I didn’t dislike the painting, but it didn’t excite me,” Greenfield said. “It excites me now.” Making it more abstract also made it that much more open to interpretation. “Some people say they see attics” in the painting, Greenfield said.
From revisiting older paintings Greenfield moved to creating even more abstract works on blank canvases. In some cases these too drew on memories of places, but she found herself thinking as much about how memory itself works as she did about specific memories of things. “We don’t keep our memories, and we destroy places over and over,” she said. “But I’m not too into narrative — I don’t like to tell people what to think.”
Other paintings, Greenfield came to think of as portals, “some kind of opening, that you want to pass through — or don’t want to.” As her paintings grew more abstract, the possibilities for interpretation widened. One canvas, she said, “people found very hopeful.” But to her it was terrifying, an image of “your last chance.” Other paintings struck her as “very pleasing,” calming. “I could probably put an adjective to all of them if I really wanted to.”
In most cases, she doesn’t want to, or need to. Though one final painting, hanging near the front of the gallery, she thought evoked a certain feeling. “It’s a real beacon of hope. We’re going to come out of the nonsense we’ve been in for the past few years. We can do it if we want to.”
Abstraction, she said, “is a world that’s new to me,” though having discovered her voice as an abstract painter, “I don’t have any plans for it, but I know it’s available,” she said. “I was delighted to break through.” And she welcomes viewers to engage with the paintings, no matter their interpretation. “I want you to tell me what you see,” she said.
“Portals and Memories” runs at City Gallery through April 25. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.