SOPHIE GRANT
DUSK
March 13 - April 26, 2025

Duck, 2023
Acrylic and wax crayon on canvas
19 x 20 inches

Croc, 2023
Acrylic and wax crayon on canvas
24 x 36 inches

Hot, 2025
Acrylic and wax on canvas
25 x 26 inches

Horse, 2025
Acrylic and wax crayon on canvas
27 x 38 inches

Tree, 2024
Acrylic and wax crayon on canvas
25 x 30 inches

Bunny, 2023
Acrylic and wax crayon on canvas
27 x 38 inches

Apple, 2023
Acrylic and wax crayon on canvas
20 x 24 inches

Book, 2024
Acrylic and wax crayon on canvas
25 x 37 inches

Eyes, 2023
Acrylic and wax crayon on canvas
27 x 38 inches

Bee, 2023
Acrylic and wax crayon on canvas
22 x 30 inches

Vespertine, 2025
Acrylic and wax crayon on canvas
36 x 66 inches

Within the hushed tones of Sophie Grant’s Dusk paintings, one sees scattered sunlight in a deepening sky; the churn of the sea; flames in a wood stove; the hundred greens of a tree-drenched valley, ratcheting up a ridge. A plaid of the senses, a time-lapse of colors, the dawn of a rash on new skin. Grant describes her paintings as “fascinations,” and likens the wispy atmospheric spaces she has made to openings of light within clouds or a gopher hole in a hill. Portals of psychic possibility or, maybe, a tear in some upholstery. Grant’s tended surfaces, ripe with painterly techniques, gesture beyond materials and medium toward a spooky yet familiar magic that is taken for granted amidst the thrum of longest days and shortest years.

“There are a few seasons of this work,” according to Grant, “which started in the summer of 2023 with the emergence of language in my daughter’s life.” Indeed, a sense of emergence (and erosion) emanates from these paintings. As does the immaterial––or at least invisible––slippage amongst beings. Two lovers, yes. Interspecies friendships, of course. But it is the umbilical pump between kin that is germane: the ways of seeing, knowing, and naming which commute expansively, and reciprocally, between generations. There are grids, holes, blooms, letters, numbers. These daily landscapes reflect the outside world infused with the inside self. The images are in fact impressions of past forms and moments of focus and play, directly inscribed into the material.

Grant’s paintings are a synthesis of staining methods from Color Field painting, stencil manipulations, and moments of observational drawing. A symphony of formal interruptions creates moments of illusion, subtly challenging depth perception. Referencing a range of paintings––from Lascaux cave drawings to Cézanne–– her abstract compositions invoke the blurred and mutable fluidity of free-form imagery.

Sophie Grant’s work and world-view come out of her own Northern California childhood, rooted in a community of artists and a physical entanglement with the environment. The extreme natural conditions of the landscape of her youth––and those of lower Manhattan, where she lives with her family now––inform her desire to know organic things in movement and inspire a materially unfixed dimension in her art. “Art is and has always been a life system for me, presenting a means for understanding how to live amid all the more rigid systems that impose themselves upon our lives,” says Grant. What does it mean to grow up in places where you watch a creek flood, see deer paths evolve over time?

The works on display were made in the mid-evening hours. Grant’s home studio shares a few internal windows with the room where her children sleep, so she often toiled in low light, lulling the paintings in a dusken atmosphere. Surfaces are hazy, vespertine, with muted tones and soft folds. Scale and time are elusive. Were they glimpses into a psychotic domestic world? A foot, a hand, a horse, a leaf. Leaky sound shapes. A phonic amnesia. Figures emerge from the babble. Insomniacs, night workers, travelers, long haul truckers––anyone who has known the stutters and flares and wobbles and womps of chronic sleeplessness––will recognize the psychedelia of half-consciousness that Grant delivers here. Is that a figure or a shadow? A shoe or a cat? Name that thing I think I see, that thing I think I am.

- Corrine Fitzpatrick, March 2025

All images by JSP Art Photography