The St. Louis gallery Philip Slein opens a special two person show featuring Boston-based artists Eva Lundsager and Cicely Carew on Friday, February 21. Curated by Jim Schmidt, a former gallerist and long-time friend of Lundsager’s, In and Of “presents two abstract painters, two generations, two diverse approaches to media, two moods, yet with such similarities that it seems as though each could have produced the other’s oeuvre had she have come from a different time and place or might have somehow emerged from the other’s body, mind, and soul.” (Jim Schmidt).

Lundsager and Carew, in their distinct ways, share an intention to express the inexpressible. While their sources of strength are different, both work intuitively, grappling with ideas not reducible to language. Their work follows internal rather than external observations which means they resist inflexible planning, they both court the unexpected. As Lundsager put it to me, “I am responding to the world, not painting the world.” It is an inner atmosphere being explored, a landscape of emotional experience. Intuition, memory, fear, longing, carve valleys into hills and form clouds delineating space. Whereas landscape painters look out at nature and attempt to capture it, Lundsager and Carew look inside themselves and create work that speaks to what they find. In that way, their lexicons of line, color, composition and shape produce works of searing beauty which explode to life in conversation in Philip Slein’s gallery, allowing bouts of sorrow and longing and great swaths of joy.

*In and Of* installation view, Philip Stein Gallery, St. Louis.

Joy and play can represent bold acts of resistance. By expressing joy, one proclaims: I am free; free of your dismissal, your refusal and your apathy. I play despite systemic subjugation. I effuse, exult, examine and exclaim even as the world wills me to silence.

Joy is the first thing I feel when seeing the work of Eva Lundsager and Cicely Carew hung together. Not just because one was the student of the other, because this is the first time they are exhibiting together, or because they’re both mothers who live and work in the Boston area. My joy mirrors theirs, vibrating in the work, catalyzing new discourse about the power and urgency of creative expression at a time when it’s under siege.

A Cicely Carew work in progress. Image courtesy of the artist.

In and Of opens at a dire time in St. Louis and across the U.S. On February 7, the National Endowment for the Arts announced the discontinuation of a key grants program supporting underserved groups and communities. On February 18, Missouri governor Mike Kehoe signed an executive order banning state funding for diversity equity and inclusion initiatives and forbidding the consideration of equity in hiring. Artists help us navigate such upheavals. Jim Schmidt explains, “...as is historically true, we look to our artists to nurture our hopes, our truths, and to help find a confirmation of pathways forward.”

Cicely Carew came up with the show’s title while listening to Marianne Williamson’s A Course in Miracles. “[Williamson] was talking about how we are of the world but not in the world,” Carew told me. The title encourages us to let go of the fear and anxiety that comes up in this political climate and trust the beauty and joy art reveals.

EVA LUNDSAGER

Eva Lundsager’s work has been characterized as living in the space between abstraction and landscape. But she relates something different. “When I’m painting, I’m not thinking landscape. It's not landscape painting, but it is about the experience of being a person on this big globe. It’s about moving through the world—but not about mountains and valleys even though it might look like that… We can’t control how other people look at our work.”

Notice the yellow line continuing through all four of Lundsager’s *Time and Distance* paintings.

In and Of presents Lundsager’s Time and Distance series, four oil paintings on canvas featuring her rich, velvety colors, wide free swaths of paint counterbalanced by obsessively worked details, and reference to art history. A yellow line runs through all four paintings as if she is looking for a thruline through the terrain of life—a path through the unknown.

The former New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote in a 1995 review of Lundsager’s work: “The profusion of rich colors and slightly organic forms can evoke close ups of a coral reef or satellite views of the earth’s surface, and is always beautiful.”

Eva Lundsager, *Time and Distance 1* oil on canvas, 58 × 76 inches, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist.

Color rules in both artists’ paintings. Lundsager says she likes to resist comfortable pairings. “It’s interesting to me to resist tasteful color, where all the colors work together… At times I’m making beautiful color arrangements or juxtapositions, and at times I’m deliberately using nauseating color. Is it beautiful or is it not? I like the refusal to be tasteful. I like the strong contrast. Areas that are different—almost blacks: blue black and brown black make me think of the negative space in 17th century portraiture. But also in the same painting having these really strong, bright, intensely chromatic cadmiums, colors that you couldn’t get before the 1870s. Especially in the paintings for this show, the upper halves…I was looking at a lot of Goya's paintings and loving these beautiful grays that he works with in the negative spaces. Gray but [with a] quality of light and color and moving from warm to cool to warm.”

Eva Lundsager, *Time and Distance 2*, oil on canvas, 58 × 76 inches, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist.

Common in her oeuvre, drips go up. This world is not literal. Time is not a line. When Lundsager mentions “moments” in her work, she means the areas of activity which contrast the stretches of space, or washes of color. Only artists can compress and extend time in that way—referencing the past, conjuring ancestors, disregarding pressure to follow along.

Eva Lundsager, *Time and Distance 3,* oil on canvas, 58 × 76 inches, 2024.

Eva Lundsager, *Time and Distance 4,* oil on canvas, 58 × 76 inches, 2024.

Lundsager starts with an idea—the yellow line going through all four paintings for example—but then allows the work to take over. “It’s like you’re walking toward something, but you don’t want to just look at what you're walking towards, you want to be aware of what’s happening around you now, and be able to pay attention to the moment, to be in the moment, and not just work towards a goal because if you’re just doing that, you’ll miss new insights that pop up. You have to be able to see things when they happen and not just look at your goal because you will miss the unexpected.”

CICELY CAREW

Carew’s multimedia, multidimensional work has been busy traveling the country. Her current solo show BeLOVEd at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, MA envelops visitors in an immersive garden of color, texture and respite. Rehearsal at Abigail Ogilvy in Los Angeles which closed in December, paired her with another color provocateur, Sneha Shrestha, aka Imagine.

Carew met Eva Lundsager when she was an MFA student at Lesley University in Cambridge. Lundsager was assigned to be her mentor. She said the veteran painter made her feel safe. “She said, you are a painter. I was working on other things and she encouraged me to go back to painting.” She recalls Lundsager teaching her not only about process, but about the life of an artist. “What to do after life in the institution? Focus on the work, take yourself seriously. Take what you want and leave the rest. Own yourself, know what you need… She has become a great friend,” Carew says.

“More than anything, Buddhist philosophy influences my work, which I hope touches on that nameless, formless thing behind all of the movement, the mess, the stuff of life.”

— Cicely Carew

For Carew, who is a mind-body facilitator in addition to a teacher and artist, creation is play. It is also a spiritual practice. “Play, break the rules, use your whole body. Do it scared, work through self-doubt. Who am I performing for?,” she asks. “Drop into the now. We don’t know [what is to come]. And it’s ok not to know. We are constantly fighting to get free. Be intentional.”

Carew’s practice is “grounded in the application of layers—adding, subtracting, working with my lexicon.” For her, layering is a way to contemplate and destabilize hierarchies.

She thinks a lot about what the world tells her she can and cannot be, and that is “multi-layered and necessary for creation of the work.” In other words, “how to be present, but not caught up in the messy, noisy, distractions of the world, how to stay connected to the divine.”

It’s interesting to hear Carew’s thoughts on how the two artists’ work differs. “Eva’s generation—Generation X—is pretty rugged, as in, I got this. Generations to follow are more fragile,” she observes. “[That generation] is more grounded in art history, adhering to tradition or thinking about where one might fit in in art historical categorizations. But the younger generation is more and. Multi-hyphenates, ampersands, lots of ands.”

Cicely Carew, *Bridging,* acrylic on yupo, 44” x 62”, 2024-2025, photography by Julia Featheringill.

For In and Of, Carew presents three works on yupo, a strong, smooth, synthetic paper that is not porous and two works on canvas. Bridging, a primarily blue painting on yupo has a more mournful quality than some of her other work. Delicate curves and drips resist or pull at areas where paint has pooled on the yupo.

Symphonic Satsang speaks to the artist’s love of jazz and dance. The more liberal brushes of color giving the impression of being both inside and outside the work. Her rigorous efforts are the muscle behind the seemingly effortless creations. She said she “creates work as a tool to speak beyond the work.”

“Color is where the conversation begins. And then the materials guide it,” Carew told the ICA Boston in a video which accompanied her show for the Jim and Audrey Foster Prize.

“The work in this exhibition... is a gift for us from the artists, a gift “of love” and a gift “in love.” It allows us, should we so choose, to set aside the slings and arrows of current misfortunes, and, at least for the time we are willing to spend, it offers respite, a gift from our fear, our sorrow, and our toil. It offers us all we wish to absorb, and, in return, asks nothing.”

— Jim Schmidt, Curator Philip Slein Gallery

Lundsager hopes that people look at the work and see something that connects to their own lives, their own experiences. At this moment in time, what does it mean to connect to a confluence of chance, surrender and intentionality? For me this work lets me be in this world but not of this world at least for the time being.

In and Of, Cicely Carew and Eva Lundsager. February 21 - March 29, 2025. Philip Slein Gallery. 4735 McPherson S. Louis, MO.

Cover Image: Installation view In and Of, courtesy of Philip Stein Gallery.