In Exhibit, Satterfield Tells Us: Take Time to Heal

Broad strokes of green. Bright flashes of pink, streaks of tan, white, and red comingling in a single brush stroke. Foad Satterfield’s canvases are layers of acrylic texture, pulling the viewer in to a chaos of colors that morph into new forms—trees, grass, wildflowers in a field, and the sky, all reflected in a rippled mirror of water.

Foad Satterfield, professor emeritus of art at Dominican University.Satterfield doesn’t call himself an artist. He is a painter, a maker, who finds refuge from darkness in nature. Sixteen of his paintings are on display at Malin Gallery in New York City through September 10 in an exhibit called Spaces Before Us - Unrestrained. Satterfield said he is grateful to have his work housed there, “not for popularity or fame, but because I think it could be helpful, useful, a missile of compassion, of empathy.”

“I want this work to be in the world,” said Satterfield. “That’s my goal, it’s always been my mission: to make the most beautiful things to bring compassion, if only for a moment, to someone who may be suffering.”

Satterfield is professor emeritus of art at Dominican University in San Rafael, CA, where he taught for 38 years. He was born in 1945 and grew up on the Gulf Coast. He characterized himself as a sensitive, observant child, soaking in the wisdom of his great aunt and elder family members who raised him while his mother attended college and his father served as a marine. He was dedicated to his Singer sewing machine, cutting out fabrics and making his own shirts, dreaming of one day becoming a fashion designer.

For the first decade of his life, Satterfield lived in Orange, a small town in east Texas where he was “under the supernatural protection of love,” he said, safe from the racism of Jim Crow south. But when the family moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana, he began to get a true taste of the oppression, discrimination, and prejudice experienced everyday by his family, friends, and peers. He observed the strange dichotomy experienced by many Black individuals between the safety they felt inside their homes and the anxiety they experienced being outside.

Jewel Lake No. 2, 2018, Satterfield.“There was always this fear of being out in the living world in a way, out in the woods. So, what I decided to do was to take that trauma and that fear and turn it in on itself,” said Satterfield. “When I was terrified or traumatized, I would go out into the woods, nature, and let nature take it from me and absorb it.”

Satterfield said he continues to find solace in nature, that nature "takes the poison out.” His outdoor meditations allow him to create paintings that are messages of “compassion, love, and forgiveness," he said.