Curator

Wilderness | Sara Woster

Academic

collector

gallerist

Sara Woster

Sara Woster captures not the view of the nocturnal landscape, but the life within it. As retold by André Merchand after Paul Klee: "In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me...I was there, listening." Sara is living in a town in the Catskills where she says "a bunch of famous painters used to come to paint very stylized scenes of elegant women in fancy dresses standing in carefully designed gardens. A lot of those gardens have lived on up here, despite the challenges of gardening on a mountaintop full of rocky, glacial soil. But when I walk up the hill to my house I pass a house thumbing its nose at all of that with fake grass and flowers swallowing up a plastic swan. When we drive by it at night out headlights light up that grass and the swan and the whole thing looks real and cinematic and magical."

Sam's Point Road

This painting is inspired by a massive mural by Edvard Munch that occupies the enormous entry space of Oslo University's assembly hall, Sara Woster describes it as “both foreboding and hopeful”. In her painting, the two massive pine trees are part of the view from her new house in the Catskills, where she has been spending the quarantine. “I’ve lost my ability to sleep lately, my mind whirls with sadness, potential terrible outcomes. So, I don’t sleep and I listen to the owls. I haven’t seen them yet but all day a massive bird flies over my yard, casting a shadow across our lawn”.

Color is the Skin of the World

In this magnificent painting we receive a closeup visit of the white owl once again. Woster says, “Even though it’s dark and moody, this painting reminds me of the Emily Dickinson line: Hope is a thing with feathers.”

When Cats Run Home

The artist explains, “One of my biggest influences the past few years has been Alma Thomas -- I know you can’t really see it in my painting -- but I am completely inspired by her approach to painting. ‘I wanted something beautiful that you could sit down and look at. And then, the paintings change on you. All you have to do is put natural light on them. Light is the mother of color, and no place stays the same. Look in that corner. It's dark. Look over here, and you see light’. I’m fascinated on that focus of light as illumination. She was looking for all kinds of beauty all the time. She wanted everybody to stop and appreciate things and that is kind of where my head is at lately. Illuminate the world so people stop for a minute and see it”

Adagio

The pine trees again. And again the grouping of brushstrokes that form loose geometric shapes like Cézanne. The nocturnal landscapes in particular create a mystic vibe. I love hearing the artist describe how she thinks about color -- “I started with one of my favorite dark greenish blacks, which is mixed with Phthalo green and Alizarin red. Then you can keep adding white and get a series of beautiful silvery greys, which when you add with a little yellow, turn into the moody, gothic brownish gray”. As Wittgenstein says -- “color spurs us to philosophize”.

Cragsmoor

The pair of pine trees is recurring. And so are the birds. In this iteration, the moon becomes the main character. “I think birds are warning us of something. But what else can happen in 2020 to warn us about? I love painting crowded skies because of the anxiety it produces. But here I use a technicolor palette so I think the combination is more playful than anxious”, Sara describes.

On the Mountain

In this painting, we see Munch’s influence again. The time of day is more ambiguous in this work. The animals are black, and their eyes are glowing. There is also a personal reference. Sara explains, “There’s the eagle in the tree. I do a lot of eagles in trees because of a story my uncle once told me about how he returned to the ranch where he and my dad grew up and he saw two eagles in a nest and couldn’t really believe it, he had never seen eagles living there before. And he felt like the eagle was his father, who had died when he was a teenager, coming back to tell him that he knew my uncle was about to get remarried. My uncle got back home, turned on his computer and found an email from an old neighbor that said something like: I was by the ranch yesterday. There are a pair of eagles nesting. Your father has come home.”

Coven

Here one of the trees becomes the object of reverence for a group of animals. “They are paying their respect to the tree and the moon and it all seems like a very hidden, secret moment of the animal kingdom. The kind of thing that might happen when we go to sleep”, says the artist.

Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble

For this beautiful, almost Romantic, painting, Woster painted over (with permission) a canvas that her daughter had started with that “lovely purple in it”. She explains she was “trying to make the moon vibrate in that way painters like Sonia Delaunay tried to achieve.”Out my window one night at sunset I saw a sliver of a moon appearing just as the sky was disappearing and it looked like this. But this was weeks ago, and these trees are now fat with leaves and I can’t see their branches at all”.

They Did Make no Noise

Sara Woster’s paintings are imbued with a Romantic mysticism, nocturnal forested landscapes shot through with celestial bodies and myriad animals, all conveyed in a very bright palette. They heave with life, but also mystery. She says she loves to paint crowded skies because of “the anxiety it produces” and she wonders: “Are these animals warning us of something?” Maybe so, but I love to be transported to these fantastical landscapes.

I organize and curate pop-up art exhibitions, typically showcasing up and coming artists based in New York.

Wilderness | Sara Woster

Curated by Gisela Gueiros