Collection: Sandra FitzSimmons

Sandra’s “stories” come off the swish of a brush, a smudge of her hand, and washes of vibrant hand-mixed colors skirting in layers of washes across the canvas, often along with some paper fragment or dried flower thrown in the mix. Her painting genre, her stories, are deeply connected to where she comes from: a childhood growing up in the deep South and coastal Lowcountry, in that natural world all around, immersed in the flora and fauna of that landscape. She observes the marsh tides, peaceful rhythms of oyster bed reefs, traipsing shorebirds, sundowns and sunrises, and serene tidal pools, seeing the inhabitants of her world as characters in a story on canvas or wood.

Deeply ingrained in the Southern culture, finding her “storytelling” through the painted image is as natural to her as those sunrises and sunsets. She almost always has a vision, a “waking dream” of the evolving tale. She sees the colors, the theme, the layout, and the titles emerge almost simultaneously: elegantly feathered coastal shorebird characters, luscious slurpy oysters, grand velvety magnolia, swaying hushed rustles of palm and palmetto fronds, and those fascinating, sassy gators, all the stuff she’s known so long, known so well.