Carrie Lederer, The Land of Magic Awaits, 120 x 480 in, mixed-media mural, 2019, Facebook/ Meta
Carrie Lederer paints nature the way nature behaves. Everything at once: growth and decay, tangle and bloom, every inch of the surface alive.
Most nature painting steps back and admires the view. Lederer works from inside the thicket, at the scale of the seed pod, and she keeps painting until the surface holds as much life as the ground itself. That density is the reason her work compels.
Across the room, they read as atmosphere, a wall of green, a field of hot pink. Up close, they open into ornament: scrolls, dotted vines, latticed leaves, birds hidden in the growth. You cannot take one in at a glance, and that is the point. The work asks for the kind of looking a real garden requires and it repays it the same way...something new every time you return.
In her own words
"Combining patterns found in the natural environment with abstracted shape and form, my focus is on the delicate, minute, natural systems that are often unnoticed or unseen."
Carrie Lederer, Nature's Mysterious Conglomerates (Garden in the Cosmos), 2026, 19th Street BART Station, Oakland, CA.
The looking has earned her serious company. Her paintings are in the collection of the Oakland Museum of California and the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art. Facebook selected her to create a permanent mural for its Fremont campus, a forty-foot painted garden that erupts into sculpted bloom. She is one of four artists featured in Full Bloom, a group exhibition in the illuminated cases at BART's 19th Street Station.
Carrie Lederer, Morning Twilight, 2014, Acyrilc on Canvas 24x24 in.
Victoria Heilweil, who curated the show says: "I love Carrie Lederer’s vibrant color palette and experimentation with materials. Her paintings are constantly revealing new things to me the more that I look at them." She chose eleven of her works for Garden of Delights, and together they show the full range of her garden, from dusk to full sun.
Wondrous Strange, a diptych, is the deepest garden in the show. There is no sky here and no ground, only bloom on bloom from edge to edge: dark sunflowers with honeycombed centers, daisies gone silver, clusters of purple berries, and drifts of white blossom that float across the surface like clouds caught in the hedge. The whole field sits on near-black, so the flowers seem lit from behind, a garden at midnight holding its own light. Lace patterns and dotted lines stitch every corner together. Across two panels the pattern never rests and never repeats, and the title keeps its promise. The longer you look, the stranger and more wondrous it gets.
The works on paper turn up the volume, and Nature's Mysterious Conglomerates I is the showstopper. Magenta pods hang like lanterns. Teal bulbs droop like beaded willows. A dark channel scattered with white stars winds through the center of the sheet, a night sky running like a river through the garden. Look closer and it keeps giving: spiderwebs, seed heads, a small compass rose in one corner, as if the piece knows you might get lost in it. This is nature, part meadow, part reef, part galaxy, and it arrives dressed for the evening.
"I respond to these natural wonderments and I’m charmed and fascinated by nature’s intrinsic capacity to create and reproduce patterns."
All eleven are on view at Upstart Modern in Sausalito through November 7.
We're open by appointment.
Garden of Delights
Curated by Victoria Heilweil
Features the work of Renee Billingslea, Leo Busscher, Victoria Heilweil, Pantea Karimi, Jackie LaLanne, Sarah McNeil, Naomi Tamura, J'Amy Tarr, Carrie Lederer and Melissa Mohammadi
Also Showing:
End of Summer Blues is group exhibition featuring the work of Natalya Burd, Michael Eastman, Bernhard Lang , Matthew Langley, Ruth Le Roux, Harry James Moody, Penny Olson , Georgina Reskala, and Nellie King Solomon.
Below are three featured works, all being shown at
Shop Camino, 444 Miller Avenue in Mill Valley.