The Shape of Place

Join us for the opening reception of a two person exhibition featuring Larry Horowitz & Janis Sanders.

Color can change the character of a landscape entirely. A familiar shoreline under a clear blue sky can feel expansive and still; the same landscape under warmer light can feel intimate, immediate, or charged. In the paintings of Janis Saunders and Larry Horowitz, color is closely tied to that shifting experience and place.

Sanders is known for his luminous blue skies, often set against warm fields, water, or shoreline. Within these expansive compositions, a small cottage, beach shack, or barn becomes a quiet point of scale. The simplicity of these forms gives his paintings a sense of clarity and openness, while his evolving use of color introduces new emotional possibilities into places that have become familiar through years of painting them. For this exhibition, Sanders pushes further into that language, exploring color beyond the palette for which he is best known.

Horowitz works from a different end of the landscape. His paintings are built through layers of paint and physical movement of the brush and palette knife, with trees, fields, shorelines, and occasional structures emerging from richly worked surfaces. The resulting landscapes have a strong physical presence. Color moves through the paintings in unexpected ways, shifting the atmosphere of a scene and giving familiar subjects a particular energy.

There is a shared simplicity in the subjects they return to. People themselves are rarely present, but traces of human life appear throughout their landscapes. A cottage on the shore, a barn in a field, or a structure tucked among trees suggests a place that is lived in, passed through, and returned to, while remaining part of a landscape shaped by weather, season, growth, and time. These are enduring forms, repeated across the New England landscape, yet neither artist treats them as fixed.

That is where the shape of a place begins to emerge. Sanders often finds it in the relationship between an immense sky and a solitary structure; Horowitz finds it in the weight of the trees, the density of a field, or the accumulation of paint across a surface. Both allow color to become an active part of that process, shaping not only what we seem, but the feeling that accompanies it.

The Shape of Place brings together two painters with distinct approaches to the New England landscape and a shared sensitivity to its changing character. Their paintings remind us how much can shift within a familiar landscape, and how color, light, and form can give the same enduring subjects an entirely different presence.