Category: Isca Greenfield-Sanders
“Have Been Swimming”
The work of Isca Greenfield-Sanders has the ability to convert even the most jaded person into a hopeless romantic. Her paintings and etchings often seduce the viewer into a wistful state–suddenly yearning for days past or simply imagined.
What better season to celebrate her six new etchings than summer? Isca’s ocean waders and mountain bathers inspired all of us at Paulson Bott Press to share our own youthful images of summers spent by waters.
As the daughter of an English teacher, I am deeply programmed to live for summer days. The three remaining seasons have always seemed but preludes to the main event. Growing up, my sisters and I spent long days in the Sierra, soaking up the fresh air and sunshine and jumping off rocks into lakes.
It is always the artist that inspires us to be, once again, at the water’s edge, where we are living life to its fullest. The joy of my summers at the lake is best expressed in one of my mother’s poems:
Have Been Swimming
Summer’s one
English Lesson
Came to me
As I frolicked
In the lake,
Whose waters
By August warmed
Let limbs
Cast easy strokes
Long reaching
Like love’s memory
Washing over me.
By simplicity buoyed,
I floated free
Beneath a blue
That bore both
Sun and moon
To light my study
Of the Present Perfect tense.
Catherine Fontaine 8/02
