Experiencing Indig's Paintings

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The paintings of Sandra Indig awaken the often dormant imaging of life and express the power struggle between life and death. Like fires from an ancient legend the colors pierce our eyes like webs and then hide politely, as the spider does in an obscure passageway that has just been discovered by us both. The artist is a subterranean painter of fire and ice and her motivations are to protect the inner nature of both these phenomenon.

It is so surprising in this time of super images to be shocked by one, but her work "Ancient Fire" seems to present a spider man like figure nailed to a pillar of black fire. One is never certain of the subjects painted as they give the impression of emerging from seemingly shifting layer upon layer of colored veils of form and line. When I asked her about this she confessed that she had not seen the image I had; Sandra is truly a subconscious painter. She is also a therapist that has worked in the penal system. So somewhere the logic of finding these metaphysical images from the jungle of the city are really no surprise. When you find them it is as discovering a new taste.

The bridges that go from life and death and the channels that form the connections between the heart and the brain are expressed in these paintings in vivid colors such as: smoldering reds. grape blacks tinged with cerulean blue. icy green-whites, and then again there are buttery yellows and lush pinks.

In each painting, even where the edges, so to speak, are softened, you may feel that a session of draconian time has run through the veins of this painter's fingers. This creative being who has recently danced with death's blades, seizes the immortal nature of these illusive subjects of death and life and their interplay that goes on over the city of our universal life and from that image, by conscious design or not, increased their volume.

Imagine what Alice in wonderland would paint at fifty plus, in Dante's purgatory during the four seasons, and you will see a Sandra Indig painting. The self-sacrifice of devotion to art and the triumphant nature of overcoming pain through art are the inner dance of her work. This was the dance I found amongst the still emerging memories of post 9/11 Manhattan, and on the other side of the ocean. This is what she emotionally recalls to me when I view her paintings now.

How useful is the art of painting that bridges the gap of time and space and forms a cocoon for the imagination and the heart to hope with.

Karl Tessler (Reviewer) England