Sabrina Piersol with HereIn

halcyon pour, 2023, oil on canvas,  49 x59 in.

[Image description: A landscape with a deep blue river flowing from the foreground to the horizon line. Flowers and grasses grow along the river’s banks. An orange, rocklike form arches over the river, above which hangs an orange moon.]

Sabrina Piersol’s “landscape-informed” paintings collapse inner and outer vision onto the canvas. Looking to both the environment around her and imagined terrain, she crafts lavishly sensuous works of vibrant color, vertiginous perspective, and undeniable energy. Piersol spoke with HereIn Editor Elizabeth Rooklidge about nature’s resilience, the influence of poetry on her work, and the value of the fragment. 

HereIn: I’m really interested in this contemporary wave of landscape painting that we’re seeing, with figures like Shara Hughes and Matthew Wong gaining a lot of attention. It all has a slightly abstracted, somewhat mystical quality about it, which I love. I do think your work is distinct from theirs in fascinating ways. You call your work “landscape-informed.” Will you tell us about that dynamic in what you’re making at the moment?

Piersol: I think about landscape a lot. I’m a lover of the natural world, but I also feel like I'm interested in how one can translate an environment into a work. I’m interested in how we can create more opportunity for projection of narrative. I think in my work right now, I'm consciously toeing the line between explicit allusions to the natural world and pure abstraction. Preceding this work, essentially everything I've made for the past decade or so has been abstract— I feel like I was staunch in my dedication to making totally abstract work. But feedback that I received, and then finally came to understand myself, is that oftentimes abstract work can be challenging to access without some kind of explicit context, or at least a title, that can give a viewer entry into the work. I try to paint clear opportunities for a viewer to easily access my work. So that's really important to me. I'm trying to figure out how I can bridge those two in a way that doesn't feel contrived and also serves as a place and space for a viewer to speculate.

copse, briefly whole, 2022, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in.

[Image description: A vibrantly colored landscape, seen as if looking through a tangle of leaves. A blue river runs underneath the horizon line, while a full moon peeks out from between the leaves.]

HereIn: What you're saying about what feel like opposite poles and trying to bridge them makes me think of the history of mysticism in painting. Mysticism is really about trying to experience and then articulate— whether it's through language or image— the totally ineffable things that are beyond us, which feel very abstract in many ways, and then trying to tie that into something that we can communicate.

Piersol: I’m glad that’s coming through in the work. I frequently look at early twentieth-century painters for inspiration. Hilma af Klint is, of course, an excellent example of somebody who was performing as a medium through her painting practice. I'd say that my work is different in that I don't believe I am a medium between the spiritual and the physical world. I’m not trying to claim that, nor am I trying to prescribe a transcendental experience for my viewers. That’s really too self-important for who I am as a person and as an artist. I just like to think that each piece is an invitation for a reflective, very human experience.

twin, sky, anywhere, 2022, flashe and oil on canvas, 30 x 24 in.

[Image description: Smooth red, orange, purple, and blue forms move from the edges of the painting toward the center, creating a sense of depth. In the upper left corner of the paining, brushy strokes in green and red suggest foliage against a blue sky.]

HereIn: I do think that in our contemporary world and our built environment, we’re in a time in which people are seeking a different way of existing spiritually in the world. Nature is the number one place people go in order to experience that. It’s one of the very few means that people feel like they have now for experiencing some sort of transcendence or something beyond themselves.

Piersol: I agree. And it's exciting to see that. I know that my work is in conversation with other painting practices functioning within that dialogue. There is an awareness of building a connection with our environment and surroundings, maybe now more than ever. But, always.

HereIn: To me that feels a bit like the always-ness of painting. It’s been declared dead so many times, but it never dies. Ever. We’re in an age when we have all of these new mediums at our fingertips, but so many artists come back to painting. 

Piersol: I think that speaks to a resilience it has. Especially in regards to the human/nature relationship. Nature and painting are two resilient things in this world that we continue to come to for refuge and reflection.

interior epoch, 2022, flashe an oil on canvas, 50 x 40 in.

[Image description: A reddish-orange, rocklike form extends from the top left of the canvas down toward the bottom corners. This form is set against a blue and green background. Seven light green patches of paint, which look like crystals, appear to project from the upper right of the canvas, through the cavern of the main red form.]

HereIn: In undergrad you double majored in classics and fine art. Tell me about the relationship between the two for you.

Piersol: It’s been a crucial part of my painting practice and continues to surprise me in the ways it comes up. As an undergrad I studied ancient Greek language, architecture, and art. I spent a lot of time on it. Like, I translated the entire Symposium. I just really enjoyed it. What’s cool about translating a dead language, in my experience, is that you have to refer to other texts that exist to find answers. So if you haven't seen a verb conjugated in a certain way, you actually don't know for certain how it's supposed to sound or feel. And I like that because there is a lot of opportunity to make creative choices about how you ultimately translate something. I feel like that relates to the visual arts because, as painters, we translate what we see, what we feel, or what we want into tangible art things, and we make intentional decisions about how each of those are visually communicated and experienced by the audience. 

hearth swept, 2023, oil on canvas,  59 x 49 in.

[Image description: A mountain landscape consumed by a wildfire. Sprays of flowers are visible in the foreground, and a mountain and blue sky in the background. Billowing flames consume the middle ground.]

More recently I've been working with a professor at UCSD who is so phenomenal. Her name is Paige DuBois. She’s written this amazing book called Sappho Is Burning. Sappho has been an excellent way for me to think about how translation and the fragment intersect. So a question that's been driving my practice at present is this: do fragments have to be really fractured? Do they need to have sharp edges? Do they have to be so difficult, or can fragments exist in a fluid space? With Sapphic poetry, it's really amazing because it survives as fragments, for the most part.

HereIn: Will you give us a refresher on Sappho?

Piersol: Sappho is interesting because she is an entity similar to Homer— we don't know for sure that it was a single writer, which I love. There’s a mystery there. But most agree she lived from roughly 620 to 570 BCE. She was an important poet because she was the first to write about embodiment as an experience. A lot of the content of her poetry surrounds longing, desire, and the erotic. She’s commonly known as the first lesbian.

Sappho writes about erotic relationships between women, another thing that is very infrequently seen in ancient Greek art and writing alike. But more importantly, she uses language to describe what it physically feels like to hold emotion— that's a vastly shifting, more feminist perspective on love. If you read Plato’s Symposium, all of these men talk about how emotion is separate from the body. It exists in this metaphysical space. Like, you become your best person if you can transcend the body. But she is brings it back into the physical, which is really, really exciting. So that's why I love her poetry.

valley blossom, 2022, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in.

[Image description: A painting reminiscent of a highly abstracted landscape. Magenta and green grass sways in the foreground, while dark blue, mountain-like forms stand at the horizon. Undulating magenta and orange lines move across the sky. A lavender orb emerges on the right of the painting.]

She also uses a lot of descriptors of the natural world. In a previous body of work, I had painted environments based on Sapphic fragments translated by one of my heroes, Anne Carson. I think these new paintings also work as speculative landscapes, an approach informed by my experience working at an experimental design firm in L.A. for a few years. Those projects invited my thinking to expand and to reflect on how we can imagine futures and situate provocations within finished products. If a work asks more questions than it answers, I think that's always a good sign. Sappho’s poetry does that because it survives in fragments, the texts written on decimated papyri and shattered pottery. We only get to have these fragmented pieces of the poetry.

So it's layered. You have your translation, which first invites opportunity for artistic choice as you're putting it into a vernacular native language. And then there are also these gaps, these things that are just unexplained. I love that because I feel like it’s ripe territory for projection of narrative. When you read them, you don't feel like you're missing anything but there's also all of this established room for you to sort of explore it and to think and to imagine. I feel like they flow really beautifully even as incomplete poems. I try to imbue that in my own work, making these things that are more concrete but then also have space for individual experience.

oracular sink, 2022, oil and flashe on canvas, 50 x 40 in.

[Image description: A thick, purple stripe of paint, which looks like a log or a river, projects from the lower right of the canvas to the left. Brushy flame-like forms alight a swirling background of green, blue, red, and orange.]

HereIn: How do you feel like the fragment manifests in these works?

Piersol: Clearly when you look at these paintings, they're not sharp. They're really organic in form. I also like transitions between color. Another thing I think about are edge relationships. That is my take on the fragmentary, the relationships between forms. I don't attempt to visualize or illustrate a physical fragment as much.

There's somewhat of a logic, but there are also parts of the painting where the logic collapses in on itself. The edge relationships are where I think that tension happens. For example, this form that I have here is quite modeled with paint, has a volumetric quality to it. And then these areas on either side of it are built up with thin, translucent layers.  I think that for me, the more modeled forms are like the “actual,” and then the other areas where things are less clear, I would say, are the “possible.”

This conversation has been edited by HereIn and the artist for length and clarity.