By Emily J. Weitz
Harriet Sawyer wakes up in the morning and paints every day, and she has done so for decades. In her current show at the Richard Demato gallery, she ties together skills, information, and emotion that she’s learned along the way.
“Painting is not something you do for an end purpose,” she says. “No one can pay you enough to put yourself into that solitary confinement. There has to be a reason in your makeup and psychology to do something like that. It’s something you have to do when you wake up every day.”
Last spring, Sawyer got together with a few other local artists for a drawing class, to give some structure to her daily practice.
“We started drawing one model,” says Sawyer, “and I hadn’t done that for a long time. It felt like the old days at the Art Students’ League when it was hot, and there was no air conditioning. And it wasn’t my kind of model. I always liked round and bold and big. Delicate was something that never interested me.”
But the subject of the one-woman show that resulted is just that: delicate, and restless, and beautiful.
“She was skinny and young, a former dancer. But she had this glow of happiness about her. A lightness: a bright light. She was a naturally happy person, someone who had never been on a Freudian couch. I found that very attractive.”
The model, a young woman in her twenties, used to bring her dog to the studio, which was part of her casual confidence.
“Her dog would always pose with her,” says Sawyer. “One time she lay down with her hand over her head, and the dog leapt onto the futon and struck a pose too. They both held it for twenty minutes.”
The idea of the dog stayed with Sawyer, and in a few of her paintings there’s a dog present, looking at the girl, who lounges about in various ways. Even though the girl’s eyes remain closed, there’s a restlessness about her as she tosses and turns among the textured sheets and across tiled floors.
Even though the anxiety and tension is evident in the paintings, Sawyer describes her process as uniquely calm and serene.
“I had been doing a lot of yoga and meditation, and was feeling calm. I started painting, and it just flowed… Still, there’s a tension to these pieces. It comes from the negative space. The composition is clean and concise, but the tension is an integral part.”
This, she says, is something that came out of her subconsciously. Even though she felt calm at the time, it is deeply embedded in who Sawyer is to explore conflict.
“These paintings are not about analyzing first to try to create something,” says Sawyer. “They come from what I feel. It’s intuitive. Even though I was feeling peaceful, my life has always been about stress and conflict. It’s never about peacefulness. I was in this state of nirvana, but I subconsciously created a sense of tension in every painting; that is intrinsically who I am.”
In these works, Sawyer feels she marries realism and abstraction in a way she’s tried to do for a long time. She combines simple graphic shapes with the human form, and mixes colors to create a glow from within.
“I’ve lived through decades,” she says, “through the 50s and 60s through today. How do you reconcile this for yourself as a painter? I used to be really into abstract art, and it just didn’t do for me anymore. It didn’t give me anything back. I want an emotional charge.”
In her newest body of work, Sawyer feels like she has found a direction that will guide her into the future.
“I feel like I’ve taken all my work from the past and brought it up to this point,” she says, “and now I have a new jumping off point that is a solid foundation. If this show is about getting to that point then I feel very happy and content with that.”
