“Live It Up!” – Work by Joelle Sander

The Cornwall Library is honored to present Live It Up!, a selection of bold, vivid landscape and abstract works by artist Joelle Sander (1942–2023) that fully justify the name of the show. Her joyful use of color was last on view at the library in February 2018, in her aptly named exhibit Comfort Me with Color.

Sander was already an award-winning author in her late 40s when she began painting seriously. She pursued painting with characteristic zeal, putting it on equal footing with writing, and attending studio classes at the 92nd Street Y in New York until the week before her passing. Early on, she took to heart a comment by artist Wolf Kahn, who noticed in one of her pastels an unusual color choice. “Ah ha,” he said, “You see, you are a colorist!”

Steve Ninteman, a fellow artist and friend, says “Color is what Joelle celebrated the most in all her work. She also pursued themes of movement, fire, scale, trees and light. What is inspiring is that she took whatever idea she was interested in and brought it directly to a large canvas. Joelle did lovely personal drawings around her Connecticut home, in museums and Central Park, but she didn’t do many preparatory sketches for paintings. Instead she would make a few simple outlines with her brush and dive in. Her color choices appeared quickly in assured passages…Looking at her surroundings with love and attention, Joelle transformed them with her personal form making, then gave them a life of their own with color choices that only she could imagine.”

Sander said, “On my best painting days I paint with freedom and a natural, naïve instinct. In addition to brushes, I use tools that run the gamut from rags, to the edges of cardboard boxes, to subway cards, to cotton balls. I used cotton balls last month to create cherry blossoms in full bloom.” She was inspired by painters as diverse as turn-of-the-20th-century Canadian landscapist Tom Thomson and American abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell.

Sander lived in New York City and had a home for many years in West Cornwall, Connecticut. In addition to her painting, she was a writer (Before Their Time; Four Generations of Teenage Mothers), poet (Margins of Light), and sculptor. Before Their Time was awarded “Best Adult Book About Children” by the Braun Center for Holocaust Studies and the Kosciuszko Foundation. At Sarah Lawrence she taught modern American poetry and for twenty years was a director of the continuing education program. She passed her love and talent for writing on to her 24-year-old granddaughter Elizabeth Sander, now a Hearst Fellow, whom she adored.

Live it Up! will offer for sale 20 paintings from Sander’s career, selected by her son Jason Sander. All sales proceeds will benefit art and poetry programs at The Cornwall Library.