Foad Satterfield Then is Now at Sanchez Art Center
Painter Foad Satterfield’s connection to nature, and to water in particular, runs deep. Growing up on the Gulf Coast, the artist reflected, “we were never more than two steps from being wet…” In addition to a visual art practice spanning over 50 years, Satterfield has had a distinguished career in academia, serving as a professor of fine art at San Rafael’s Dominican University for over three decades, as well as directing the university’s San Marco Gallery from 1980 to 2013.
In recent years, Satterfield’s accomplished work has begun to appear on a broader stage, with shows on both coasts garnering increasing critical attention. Present By Past at SF’s Maybaum Gallery in 2022 was followed by Space Before Us, Unrestrained at Malin Gallery in New York in 2022, along with a show at their Colorado branch Elemental Variations in Aspen in 2023. Other exhibitions of note include a memorable show, Things Known, at St. Mary’s College in 2019, as well as numerous exhibitions at Burlingame’s Studio Shop Gallery.
Satterfield grew up in a country whose soil was deeply permeated with injustice. Those whose skin color afforded them access at birth to a life of relative privilege took this situation for granted, while those in the opposite position were made painfully aware on a continual basis just how their aspirations might be constrained by their complexion. The artist’s rise to prominence in his field, despite the deck being stacked against him, is a testament to his boundless talent, persistence, and infinite grace. Satterfield is himself overflowing with gratitude: for his gifts, his success, his family, indeed for life itself.
Recently, the Sanchez Art Center in Pacifica presented an exhibition of Satterfield’s work, Then is Now, and as well hosted an artist’s talk on a chilly Superbowl Sunday. A vibrant performance by the Bernini Baroque Trio accompanied the event. Gallery Director Jerry Barrish, who curated the exhibition, also moderated the talk. Barrish noted that he has known Satterfield for 28 years, bemoaning the delay in presenting his work at Sanchez.
After his introduction, the artist took over the discussion. Foad Satterfield was born in Orange, Texas, moving at the age of eight to Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he would spend the rest of his childhood. “I’d already been held back, I flunked the first grade,” he shared, explaining, “My English skills were not strong. At home we spoke a mixture of English and French.” It was certainly understandable that a small, sensitive child with language issues would have difficulties assimilating into a culture, the Jim Crow south of the 1950s, already predisposed to exclude him.
The level of pain and discomfort this caused him is never dwelt upon, certainly not here, and to my knowledge this is not something he cares to discuss at length. We learn of a compassionate 3rd grade teacher who took the unmoored child aside and taught him how to cut stencils from notebook covers using a razor blade, and then to paint these on cloth “with a flat brush and color. Red, green, and yellow. That was my first experience making things…” he shares, adding that “making things” has been essential to him ever since.
Then is Now offered a lovely glimpse into the artist’s oeuvre with an “intimate retrospective” consisting of seven works spanning seventeen years. Early in his talk, Satterfield alludes to additional, earlier work painted with a vastly different technique, “no sign or indication of the artist’s hand. All the edges smooth and clean.” Feeling unsatisfied with this approach, he began to explore other forms more connected to gesture, materials, and process. Drawn to the power and beauty of African art, but lacking the funds to acquire quite the pieces he desired, the artist began a more modest collection with terra cotta vessels, often chipped or broken. These forms, evocative of the human figure, inspired the “Broken Vessel” series, of which the painting Red (2006) is a part. The stencil technique, we learn, was employed in this earliest of the canvases on view, here the artist using plaster, rather than paint, to create a dimensional effect.
Indeed, Red is all about texture. The vessel form, obsessively duplicated across the massive canvas, sets up an initial rhythm and gesture for the eye to follow, almost like musical notation on a staff. Or braille, as the crusty forms progress across the surface seemingly inviting us to touch, to run our hands across their surface to better comprehend the message they contain. As one might expect, this work explores the warm range of the color spectrum, yellow to violet, punctuated by brilliant reds, dramatic blacks, and shot through with a ray or two of golden light—like an epiphany.
Underlying the entire body of recent work is the artist’s desire to express something about his relationship to the world around him, to the landscape, and to nature. He describes this more eloquently as “the outside world, the inner world, materials, and the compositional elements of making my paintings simply serve to give my narratives a place to dwell.”
He reflects on the tradition of landscape painting, and the attraction of iconic vistas like Yosemite’s El Capitan. When first visiting Yosemite, while awed by the majesty of El Cap, it was instead a small pond behind the cabin where he was staying that captured his imagination, wanting to “bring to that scrubby little pond the same level of attention, to find it of the same significance, as El Capitan.” He wanted “to bring to it the quality of what moves us when we are in the company of something bigger than ourselves.” This is, of course, an artist’s secret hiding in plain sight—it’s not the scenery that makes for great art, but what you do with it. Certainly photographs of Monet’s Giverny gardens, while charming, pale in comparison to that earlier artist’s revolutionary Nymphéas.
Satterfield’s canvases range in scale from large to monumental, Big Fish Camp, Poem (2014), the “scrubby pond,” spanning around six by seven feet. He does not care to work on small paintings, finding them far too easy to overwork. Like AbEx painters, such as Jackson Pollock, the artist activates every square inch of the canvas with dynamic, gestural energy—where one flings dripped paint, the other employs a dizzying array of vigorous brushstrokes. This image is moody, dramatic, fecund. The upper half is shot through with with dusky light, while a middle ground, perhaps patches of sky, shimmers with vibrant rosy hues—pink, violet, gold. A network of dark lines soaring upward suggests trees, then refutes the suggestion, breaking into their own quirky dance of rhythm, repetition, and sheer joy of mark-making. It feels like autumn, desolate, chilly, maybe in a sense bereft—but simultaneously breathtaking, transcendent, sublime.
When the scale of a work is so large that it’s hard to take the whole thing in, we respond in a variety of ways. We may move further away, to grasp the entire composition, or move our gaze, or our body, back and forth, up and down, to appreciate the work in full. With the massive Great Epic #1 (2018), one is drawn to employ these tactics, and as well to move closer still, for the dizzying satisfaction of losing oneself to total immersion in the paint.
While traditional landscapes may employ horizon lines or perspective devices, Satterfield often takes a different tack, with a soft-focus, gestural marking technique inviting the viewer to experience the work from various vantage points. We absorb waves of color and energy, the paint refusing to comply with a desire that it settle down, come into focus, or indeed suggest any single vista. Presenting a watery view, the layered field of marks could represent reflected sky, blossoms or plants, or perhaps fish swimming beneath. A darker triangular section in deep green and violet, flecked with pink, holds down the upper left corner, with the lower edge rimmed by an irregular band of dark hues tending to blue-black. This vibrant work glows from within, bright patches of yellow and pastel violet shot through with flickers of coral. Our eye, drawn initially to marks in the upper left, soon darts back and forth, spiraling towards the center for a while, then branching out in all directions. Individual passages, jaw-dropping colors, swirls of pattern and energy, engage us in an indescribable manner, akin to the transcendent experience of being in nature itself.
From the earliest work on view, Red, (2006), to the most recent Trilogy #5, (2023), the work generates power from reservoirs of energy—clearly pent up and grateful to flow, indeed burst at times onto the canvas. Beauty is at its best when there’s an ache to it, an awareness of the flip side, the pain and the ugliness never far away, just a trick, perhaps, of the light can make the shift. But we can focus, or attempt to, on the bright side. Satterfield, who has without question seen both sides of life, has chosen to create, live, and to share, visions of positivity. Has chosen to focus on the light, the energies that sustain and connect us to each other. It bears noting that the artist has for decades sustained an ongoing meditation practice, one integral to the work, and views this as “accomplishing a great deal by doing nothing.”
When asked about his brushstrokes, if he felt indebted in some way to Van Gogh, his deft answer was kind of a “Yes, but…” which he employed in response to numerous inquiries about his process and influences. Van Gogh’s work, he suggests, is one significant part of the history of Western art which he, like most thoughtful contemporary painters, has drawn upon. The viewer’s perception is really perhaps not so much about line quality, but the energy, the sense of urgency and a conviction that would not bear disbelief. It simply is what it is. Finally one must note, while the canvases on view are massive, a tour de force of energy and scale in themselves, this is barely the tip of the iceberg… A prolific artist for half a century, Foad Satterfield’s beautiful, peaceful, challenging, and throughout thought-provoking work demands even broader attention, with future retrospectives on an expansive scale.
Barbara Morris
Foad Satterfield Then is Now closed at Sanchez Art Center, Pacifica, on February 11, 2024.