“Let Nature In”: Behind My Piece At The Painting Center
Sari Shryack Star Jasmine, Oil on wood, 11×14” 2025
I’m in New York this week for the opening of a group show at The Painting Center featuring my painting Star Jasmine. The exhibit Let Nature In includes the work of 50 artists “who continue to engage with the natural world by offering fresh perspectives on our ever-evolving relationship with the environment” (The Painting Center).
Ahead of the show opening on Thursday, July 24, I wanted to share a bit about my painting and my thoughts behind its creation. Here goes:
My botanical pieces are often fraught love letters to the places I'm from, the places I grew up, and the places I now live: South Carolina, the Ozarks, and Central Texas, respectively. And also, what it can feel like growing up and living in deep red places that continue to betray your material love for the plants and the people that fill your memories, your montages, your moments.
The story of this piece started when I took a painting workshop in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I walked on the hilly roads, smelling the most beautiful jasmine scent. I remember the moment so clearly—how the scent lingered in the humid air. And come to find out, the walls were littered with what I later learned was Star Jasmine. Though I first discovered it by the name many southerners colloquially call it: Dixie Jasmine.
It's a species native to southeast China. But it's since become a pervasive transplant in the southeastern United States. I looked up this plant with the intention to grow it in my own yard. So that I might find a way to summon a memory—of my mom's mom, fighting back the kudzu and the jasmine, trying to keep them from overtaking her big garden. That garden isn't just a family memory from the times we drove down to South Carolina from the Ozarks. It's also tied to the care packages she sent us every fall: pear preserves and pecans.
There was a prescient, almost storybook quality to that yard. It felt fictional and sacred at the same time.The vine of this plant circles and I guess metaphorically, the story is winding too. That's the beauty and the terror, the disgust and the love, the seed-sowing and harvest—all wrapped into one story of what it's like to be southern.
To look at something, to Google its name, and find it adorned with a haunting word that describes a horrible past. And yet at the same time be reminded of bounty, sweetness, and generosity. That is the paradox.
I think anyone who is from the south—or who has benefited from the south, or has any connection to the southeastern United States—has a responsibility to hold both: the beauty of the land and the pervasive shrapnel of shameful history.
And I think it's a reminder, in a day and age where we are so eager for things to be either good or bad, that some things are both. Just like how you can cry out of pride, or laugh so hard that tears spill from your eyes. Just like how you can hold so much grief that all you can do is laugh.
The south—like our most primal human reactions—is an inextricable grip of sour reality and breathtaking beauty. And the burden of that is: we must live with both. We must learn to sway and enjoy, while holding our hearts heavy and anchored.
Just like the dance I've tried to paint in this piece.
– Sari
Let Nature In is on view at The Painting Center (547 W. 27th St. Suite 500, New York, New York 10001) from July 22 to August 16. The opening is July 24 from 5:00-8:00 pm.