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"I've painted since before I could walk. My passionate memories are most often associated with nature, with the look of sun on greenery. I love a horizon line, buildings against sky for example; I've lived in beautiful places and walked into beautiful skies, in Europe, Israel, and both U.S. coasts.
I started using this sphere as a focal point (although for years, painting semi-abstractly, it was my head in the mirror beyond the chaos of my studio) after two years of not painting, during which I went through a hero's journey of sorts. So, these spheres can be seen as the self, newly emerged entire, or "integre", as the French say. I use paint and other material sensuously, loving both its concreteness and its transparency. This suggests for me both the transient nature and the permanence of us all. Geometry means a lot to me: solidity, a wall to butt up against, the square, the room (the haven), and all of its ramifications. When I walk, there is a feeling of myself affecting earth, wandering through it as it passes through me. The sky sweeps me away with it, under it, forward into it. As with other physical activities, in painting and art there is the desire and need to merge and the concrete delight in doing it."
I glaze the lower half with dark tones that glow through each other like embers, working various shades of white and hints of color into the light panels, working in newspaper clippings, excerpts from journals, packaging materials, canvas, exotic handmade papers, burlap, etc. I choose these for their shapes, textures and content, and paint over them when appropriate. The divided canvas is like a sea or a field of darkness and a vast expanse of sky floating over it, sometimes with doors or windows in the "sky" and the "earth". These are inspired by all the many landscapes, horizons and seas I've moved into and that have moved into me. I use elemental forms; yet, their texture, content, tones and even composition can be surprisingly complex. Shapes suggest suns, moons, mountains, water, air, fire. When the canvas is divided, and sometimes where there is a sphere or globe, it can suggest cycles, or light falling on a sundial. Through the darkness of the momentary, the Earth, into sky, liberation, the everlasting...glowing windows suggest lit inner worlds. They echo the painting's frame--microcosm and macrocosm, life existing in the dark places, sleeping but fertile. Sometimes divided tones suggest light falling into small rooms, like those I have experienced and lived in. The broad panels with pentimenti appearing through them sometimes remind me of sky glimpsed through buildings, as in many of the cities I've walked through. These pieces contain the power and serenity of earth, and a trembling mystery of light seen through darkness: the mystery of time and the sensuality of being, of walking through it."
Spector's paintings speak to me on a primeval
level. There's so much going on under the surface--like a pagan
dance that one can barely sense going on under the woods; but
whether one can see it or not, one knows it's there. Dr. Scott Lines
"Sarah Spector's paintings depict not only her physical relationship to the world, but multiply occurring perceptions of the subtle realms. Hidden within her works is a pure mathematics, the Source manifesting Itself through core, original patterns. These patterns are like the most subtle cause of form in the "matrix", or the world of appearances. Each painting is a poem about am emptiness that seems to break apart at its conception. There at the edge of time is Sarah's eye perceiving the first sun rays of the eternal feminine, creating forms. Many of her paintings have a circle near the center. This circle depicts Soul in relationship to a universe of morphing structures continuously being created and destroyed, where cosmic bodies dance, planets encircle the sun, and electrons spin around neutrons. Streams of geometric forms coalesce and break up simultaneously. She creates pieces that, though lushly beautiful, also delve into the essential structures out of which the world is born. She combines the technical mastery of color with the spiritual wisdom of one who has experienced this cosmic birthing into a divine sea. Her keen intuition in this process deepens as she continues to dive repeatedly into her relationship with it." Steven Henderson: psychic healer and teacher
"Spiritual art is as old as the spiritual quest
itself. This painter reveals to our eye serenity of spirit as the acolyte reveals it to his soul: not through insipid languor, but through turbulent striving. Her meditative paintings are genuinely meditative...
Her paintings are delicate and stately meditations. Morticed into the stately structure are circles, bands and rectangles, textured, scumbled, scraped into, layered onto. Colors halate and glow within ethereal mists or earthen tracts. Intricate adventures follow each other; all are held in delicate balance, all add up to one majestic, sumptuous whole. Here, a moonlight coolness throbs faintly with a heart-like red bell's eye, then sparks to life with a yellow electrocardiogram-like line. Elsewhere, we see a cool gloaming wherein pulse dark fingers of lava. A clear, wintry firmament is sectioned off by a dense, roiling band of black crimson. Plumbing here, ransacking there, bestowing and violating as she goes, Spector searches into each painting for nuance, intricacy, opulence and drama. Passage follows passage of earthy tempestuousness-- yet see the whole, and all balances into a tranquil delicacy. Spector's majestic paintings are mystical in the
truest sense: Marco Aidala, “Art of Spirit: Sarah Spector”
Sisyphus "There's a part of me that misses those old days when paintings were flat and sculptures weren't. I say that with some nostalgia because for quite a while now I've been seeing a massive impulse to tear down that traditional distinction. What might, in my opinion, be better referred to as "wall sculpture" keeps passing as innovative painting. It's usually relief-construction with color. I'm aware that the precedents for this kind of innovation go back to Johns and maybe further (which makes it all seem almost orthodox), nevertheless the whole idea strikes me as being a somewhat desperate tactic. It's as if (in strict obedience to the prevailing dictum that innovation and quality are one and the same) the only worthy thing left for painting to be is...sculpture. That kind of innovation never intrigues me the way more traditional painting of high caliber always does. That is the backdrop against which the work of Sarah Spector stands out so well. Here, finally (again), is a painter who paints. And she does it well. Her energetic abstractions on canvas and paper seem to fuse geometry with biology. Her shapes and spaces are as much the result of growth as measure. One could expect them to bleed if punctured. These paintings appear larger than their physical dimensions. They feel lighter than their physical weight. They often achieve a delicate balance that somehow surprises. Painterly triangles, transparent blocks, and floating crescents. Brush strokes and color. This is painting on its own. It borrows nothing. Spector's straightforward reliance on just those elements that have been the mainstay of the medium is cause for respect. It's a welcome example of resourcefulness running deep rather than wide. The best pieces in this show bring to mind the sparkle of an orange cut open. They represent the wet, inner pulp of pure painting." David Carter, "Sarah Spector at Dumbarton Concert Gallery", Eyewash
"Geometries of change, initiation: Reaching to a promise of enchantment unknown yet somehow familiar, her work suggests mystical abstractions of Indian Tantra and Yantra painting. An ambiance of sacred artifact or talisman emanates from them; they hold a considerable sense of power. They carry secrets of intensity that pull in the viewer as if to step out from this world into another. In Spector's quest for the imaginary, the ethereal,
an intuitive architecture holds firm to a wordly sense of ground
and the real. Blush with rich, immediate crimsons, anointing blood reds, wispy contrasting blues, and shadowed dark pockets of comfortable silences, these pieces announce the arrival of a sense of belonging that exists beyond the familiar, to rejuvenation, protection...if one takes the step across the threshold, the sacred pass, the access way, a garden, window, waters, fires... The world on the other side is a more fulfilled, more heartfully luminous world. Sarah Spector will surely continue the work of birthing her unpretentious, vulnerable, buoyant vision, delivering emotionally valuable sanctuaries that belong to us all." William Moulton, “The Reenchantment of the Art of Sarah Spector” Tisra Til |
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In
the paintings of the last few years, there tends to be a horizon.
I divide the canvas in half and have often placed a sphere somewhere
on top of the dividing line. 
"I
texture the whole surface with medium and a palette knife. Typically,
I divide the canvas with a line across the middle, usually slightly
above center (like a horizon).
"This
calms me down SO MUCH, I cannot tell you. It centers me. It focuses
my awareness down to one spot, the moon, surrounded by these intense
colors-- red, black...it's a mandala. I feel cool, blue colors
in my brain when I look at it. It makes me happy.
