Sara Anstis

Anstis begins her process by drawing the figures and later removes all but the most necessary formal elements. Using close cropping to evoke a productive claustrophobia, the gestures and expressions of her figures come into prominence, generating a potent atmospheric and psychological tension. It is during this conjuring process that her smaller symbolic objects begin to populate the paintings, curiously repeated by Anstis within her bodies of work—clues left like breadcrumbs in the dark.

In recent years, Anstis has moved fluently from working primarily with pastel on paper to realizing large-scale oil on canvas. The touch necessitated by pastel and the soft surface quality generated by the unmediated connection with the artist’s skin is translated into paint while retaining the sense of immediacy that is so integral to the artist’s surfaces. Linking the intimacy of the subject with that of the medium itself, Anstis further toys with the senses by depicting tender moments of touch between her figures, who are oftentimes depicted accompanied by furred animals, bristling with tactility. 

Throughout Anstis’s works, markers of nature and human form are disassembled and entwined. Fragments of highly pigmented landscapes are framed by the bodies within them, seen through the crook of an arm or beyond an arched back. The forest—a site of transformation, resonant with the metaphor of unconscious thought—reappears as processed or carved wood in many forms, and the enigmatic presence of water is ever-present, acting as a container or a shifting border to activities that play out within the picture plane. While these elements evoke a pastoral beauty that abounds with art historical references, there is an unmistakable wildness at play calling upon the darker truths of the natural world: the brutality of the elements, latent violence, and the presence of power differentials underscoring even the most affectionate of interactions between animals and humans alike.