Sandra Charlap’s “Seen From Above”
Rosalind & Alfred Lippman Gallery
1025 South Orange Avenue, Short Hills, NJ
What we need now is a new outlook. Celebrated artist Sandra Charlap’s must-see, 39-piece exhibition Seen From Above examines both familiar and faraway places from a different point of view—overhead.
Martialing formidable skills with acrylic, water color, ink, mosaic and gold leaf, Charlap’s works are personal, universal, and glorious.
What Led to This Vision
Charlap, now in her 50s, has always had a passion for art, for living.
“Without a passion—it doesn’t matter for what–it’s not enough of a life,” Charlap said.
She graduated from Parsons School of Design in 1988 with a degree in illustration. She soon formed Sandra Levine Ceramics (Levine is her birth name) creating custom table top pieces for fabled NYC stores—Bendels, Barneys. Prestige style magazines featured her works. But production demands interfered with other facets of life.
Charlap pivoted. With a BFA from Montclair State, she added arts education to her passions. There were gratifying years teaching at secondary schools and SOMA Adult School. She now teaches privately and at nonprofits including South Orange’s Jespy House. Her painting and beadwork kits combine teaching with entrepreneurship – art lessons in a box.
There’s more. An animal lover, in 2007 she founded The Illustrated Pet. Commissioned watercolors bring each pooch or moggy to life.
Throughout, there were other demands. Married in 1997, Charlap had children then found herself divorced with preschoolers. Those years, family held center stage. Then, with children grown, Charlap relocated from a longtime Maplewood home to an apartment in East Orange.
Now, time and spare bedrooms are for art. “I’m concentrating on both my painting and getting my work out,” Charlap said. “I love working at home. I will paint for ten hours at a stretch with short breaks to grab a tuna sandwich, walk my dog. The maps demand deep focus. With my flower, garden and pet paintings I decompress a bit.”
“I realized I was free to travel.”
“I realized I was free, really free to travel. I’ve always had a thirst for knowledge, for new experiences, new places,” Charlap said.
There were worldwide destinations which she physically visited. She’s enjoyed three (so far) immersive art residencies in Provence, France soaking in the light, the colors, the cross-pollination from fellow artists.
“It was an environment where I could go deep. The art exploded from there,” Charlap said.
When she needed a palette change, she traveled north and took inspiration from Monet’s Giverny.
There were places she visited virtually. “I started thinking about Toledo, Spain and I realized I could use Google Maps, Google Earth to get a sense of it,” Charlap said.
With those images, she took her metaphorical skydive into her aerial perspectives.
Exhibit Thoughts
The works in Seen From Above are precise representations—maps. “You can trace every street on my maps,” Charlap said.
Most works are seen from directly above. Some pieces are viewed from an angle, as from a plane descending for landing. Some works are literally from a plane, Newark Airport seen through wisps of clouds, Toronto Airport landing fields.
When you follow her maps, space and time shift. As with tracing a mandala, you just might enter a meditative state.
Most of the works are in acrylic, ink, water color, gold leaf. Some are dramatic mosaics: Manhattan with its Central Park a glass emerald in the city grid. Or the surprising City Lights, a host of street lights done in flat sided marble, hemispheres projecting upward.
Thematically, the works are cousins. Visually they vary. Some are reminiscent of crazy quilts or 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles. Some veer towards the abstract, stunningly in the 48” by 60” Orange Trees, the exotic trees punctuating the green vegetation of a lush Australian arboretum.
Or Venice, displayed above Red Boxes. The Venetian rooftops of the first transmogrify into a pattern of abstract geometry in the second.
Humans rarely appear. When they do–Asbury Park–Charlap makes a sly comment on homo sapiens at play.
But the human imprint on the natural environment is in the DNA of every work. In both modern and medieval cities nature is obliterated. Or, nature is tamed into cultivated crop fields. Charlap also asks us to consider the American suburbs that supplanted that farmland. And if waterways historically determined the layout of our cities, she brings home how a nexus of roads and highways later shaped them. (Newark/Harrison).
A master colorist, Charlap’s show presents a visual banquet: the purples, indigos of city nights animated by the orange, yellow streaks of speeding automobile headlamps or the ochres, reds, clays of Italy, paler blues and pinks of Morocco. There are the undulating bands of a pair of Rice Fields, China (1 & 2), unspooling ribbons of fauve color.
Some pieces are static. Others have movement: Chicago Miracle Mile. “It has a very dynamic line,” Charlap said.
And have fun with her art, too. Play a game of “Where Are We?” Spoiler: Rome is easy. “I sat in a restaurant looking up at the Pantheon and thought about how I first painted the Pantheon from above,” Charlap said.
Barcelona, closest to Charlap’s illustration roots, made me laugh. With its cathedral and surrounding buildings seen in elevation her fabulously juxtaposed colors evoke childhood wonder in illustrations by Laurent and Jean de Brunhoff or, years later, Charles Burchfeld’s wacky houses.
It’s a gorgeous show. It’s a mature artist planting a flag: I’m here and here is planet earth.
