Artist Sees The Possibilities

It’s hard to look at Joyce Greenfield’s Water Under the Bridge and not think of the recent smoke from forest fires in Canada that choked the air last week. All the signals are there — a wall of angry flames, a sky full of soot, the land seeming to melt away in the heat. But that’s not what the painting has to be. It could be autumn, the fiery colors the result of the changing of foliage. The dark sky could be rain clouds. Either way, the painting is about transformation. Fast or slow, destructive, creative, cyclical, the brush strokes mark the change.

Water Under the Bridge is part of ​“This Is Not Pretty,” a show of Greenfield’s paintings up now at City Gallery on Upper State Street through June 25. As Greenfield relates in an accompanying statement, ​“the work in this show is expressing my anxieties concerning climate change. It is not an attempt to record specific episodes or locations but it is an exercise in exploring what colors, images, and shapes can help me express the threat and possibilities at hand.” This is in keeping with her general approach to painting, which taps into both the technical aspects of creating an image and the emotions that the process evokes. “ ​‘Light’ always guides me to subjects,” she writes. ​“How light behaves, reflects, changes and tells the viewer much about the environment in the image. The joy in the act of painting is restorative when I take on such a serious subject.”

That sense of catharsis for Greenfield in creating the paintings has its parallel in her take on the subject at hand — a take that moves past the doom-laden perspective that accompanies some climate change talk and lands on the possibility of finding new ways to react. ​“Choosing the vulnerability of plants as early victims of the changes we are experiencing was inspired by the appreciation of plants as they respond to harsh changes,” she writes. ​“It could be imagined that they are evolving, adapting and becoming another beautiful specimen and sending the message that not all is lost.”

It’s up to us to decide whether we want to try to resolve that ambiguity or live within it. ​“I hope that the viewer will have their own reactions, ideas, memories and hope as they explore the paintings. The painting is about what you see and how you react to it,” Greenfield writes.

But while Greenfield gives us permission to interpret her paintings as we will, the canvases also reward those who embrace the sense of flux she’s leaning into. For those who equate climate change with the end of the world, Sunflower depicts a plant that’s decaying, many of its petals already dead while the others are heading in that direction. The narrative, however, can be made more complex. What if the plant is coming back to life in a new season, the strong, young petals in the process of pushing out the old, dead ones aside? What if the entire flower is adapting, evolving — looking nothing like a sunflower we’ve seen before but thriving in its new form? Greenfield’s paintings let us practice seeing multiple ways forward. What if we then see the world beyond the gallery the same way?

“This Is Not Pretty” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through June 25. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.