SUSAN RAND RECURRING DREAMS
SHAMNOSKI
Cover - It All Comes Down To You, 2025, 12” x 12”, oil on panel
SUSAN RAND RECURRING DREAMS June 25th to July 25th, 2026
SHAMNOSKI 115 east 72nd Street New York, NY 10021
INTRODUCTION It’s never an easy task for a gallery to find an artist, nor vice versa. I felt truly humbled when Susan Rand decided to sign on with my then -plucky online venture nearly three years ago. There are not many obvious attractors to working with an online -only, art -fair-focused gallery, but from the outset there was an undeniable sense of momentum. Her work sold immediately through the very first email presentation we sent, and then became the first sales of the first art fair I participated in solo. For me, this was both a genuine affirmation and a meaningful indication that I had perhaps been making a few correct decisions along the way. I had always felt connected to Susan ’s work, but those early successes reinforced the confidence I had in her as a painter. Over the last three years, it has been a pleasure not only to get to know Susan personally, but also to watch her evolve continuously as an artist. What remains most striking is the degree to which she approaches painting with the curiosity and urgency of someone just beginning the process. Despite 26 years of experience in painting, Susan still treats painting as an open -ended pursuit. She is constantly searching for new formal possibilities, new emotional registers, and new ways to challenge herself and her practice. There is nothing static or complacent about her work. Her paintings instead possess a restlessness that feels increasingly rare in contemporary painting. Susan Rand ’s paintings occupy a unique and compelling position within the continued evolution of contemporary figurative painting, where the boundaries between abstraction, memory, and observation become deliberately unstable. Her work resists the polished finality that defines much contemporary figuration and instead embraces a language of layered gesture and painterly improvisation that feels deeply rooted in the emotional possibilities of paint itself. Figures emerge and recede through painted and often collaged surfaces, interiors dissolve into atmosphere, and moments of domestic familiarity become psychologically charged through accumulation and ambiguity.
What distinguishes Rand ’s work is the degree to which it privileges sensation over description. Her paintings are not constructed around narrative so much as emotional resonance. Dogs, figures, flowers, furniture, and fragments of landscape and seascape drift through compositions that feel both intimate and slightly disorienting, recalling the way our memories can compresses space and experience. Rand participates in a lineage of painters for whom figuration functions less as illustration but rather as a vehicle for psychological atmosphere. There are echoes of Pierre Bonnard in the way Rand allows color to structure space rather than perspective, flattening interiors into rhythmic networks of pattern and light. In this most recent body of work, surfaces thickly applied with paint via a palette knife carry hints of the gestural immediacy associated with postwar American abstraction, particularly Grace Hartigan, whose work similarly refused rigid distinctions between abstraction and representation. Rand ’s painting remains active and searching and hovers at the edge of dissolution without ever fully disappearing. Importantly, Rand ’s work possesses an unusual sincerity. As is often the case with contemporary figuration, her imagery does not function as parody or stylistic affectation, but as a means of preserving emotional immediacy. The figures in each painting feel observed rather than constructed and the spaces feel remembered rather than overly designed. This vulnerability lends her paintings some of their particular psychological force. Ultimately, Susan Rand ’s work succeeds because she approaches painting as an active emotional process rather than a fixed image. Her works are not merely depictions of people or places, but records of perception. Through dense surfaces and shrouded forms, Rand creates paintings that feel lived in rather than composed, allowing moments of tenderness, familiarity, humor, melancholy, and memory to emerge gradually through the material language of paint. Matthew Shamno ski
Prelude, 2025, 12” x 12”, oil on panel
She Hoped For A First Kiss, 2025, 12” x 12”, oil on panel
Peg Leg Pink, 2025, 12” x 12”, oil on panel
“I have a small sketchbook of quick drawings done mostly at the beach. I also have a lot of photos on my phone of figures that I reference from, embellish them, collage with them. ”
Blue Lagoon, 2025, 12” x 12”, oil on panel
“When I decided to work on suspending my inner critic and letting go of the rules a depth of feelings, primal emotions of joy, fear, foreboding, humor surfaced … keep going … no rules...getting closer. ”
Nobody Said This Would Be Easy, 2025, 12” x 12”, oil on panel
Totemic Gathering I, 2025, 12” x 12”, oil on panel
Totemic Gathering II, 2025, 12” x 12”, oil on panel
The Fireman’s Wife, 2025, 12” x 12”, oil on panel
He Read My Mind, 2025, 12” x 12”, oil on panel
Figurative painting is at the core of art; it has been around for millennia and for good reason. helps us answer that nagging question; “Who am I? ” By depicting images that resemble us, artists offer a universal language for identity, emotion and experience. Their work holds up a mirror to our lives and provides a portal to explore our dimensions. When brave American artists brought the figure back into painting in the late twentieth century after a generation of abstraction, they depicted a contemporary reality with all the angst and energy a paint -thrown abstraction, but their work returned the viewer to a self -reflective experience.
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Susan Rand was also an abstractionist who now focuses on the figure, where she has been working for the past three decades. In her new work, she explores the figure with a stylistic nod toward artists such as Nicolas de Stael, David Park and Richard Diebenkorn. While contemplating these artists ’ techniques and compositions, Rand has made the genre her own. Using a palette knife and oil paint to develop a juicy surface with strong blocks of color, her figures represent contemporary life in a New England seaside backdrop. Her recent figures have been observed and scrutinized from the top of the beach where they are central to the composition, often bisecting two similar landscapes. Participating in perhaps a summer vacation, the dynamics between family and friends range from carefree to challenging to angst -ridden. The blocks of audacious color, the sun -tanned figures, the luscious texture and the sea -centric landscapes combined, make for delightful eye candy, yet the spatial tensions, faceless bodies and abstracted forms bring us into a recognizable world of contemplation, worry, power, alienation, and love. The viewing experience is artful as it captures and holds. Susan Rand has expressed the human condition using her travel and familial life as inspiration. It is her highly intuitive understanding of people, their emotions and how they relate to one another that has always been on display for viewers to contemplat e. These current works pare down the figure, edging it to abstraction, which brings the mirror closer and widens the portal at a critical time when we are asking: “ Who am I? ” Lee Findlay Potter
Guardian, 2025, 40” x 40”, oil on canvas
Distant Cousins, 2025, 12” x 12”, oil on panel
Maybe You Will marry Him One Day, 2025, 12” x 12”, oil on panel
Pink Cloud, 2025, 12” x 12”, oil on panel
Like A Mother, 2025, 12” x 12”, oil on panel
The Wizard, 2025, 12” x 12”, oil on panel
2026 Sweet Williams
2011 Vermont Studio Center artist grant residency The Norfolk Library , solo show Pandion Gallery, Fishers Island, N.Y.
2025 Eckert Fine Art Hamptons Art Fair Projects 28
2010 Bowery Gallery, juried exhibit by Rackstraw Downes Tyrone Guthrie Centre residency, Co. Monahan, Ireland The RE Institute Art Hamptons Art Palm Beach Eckert Fine Art Brick Walk Fine Art Hotchkiss Library
2024 The Hamptons Fine Art Fair, Projects 28 Norfolk Library Projects 28 2021 Standard Space Gallery, Sharon, Ct. North Elm Gallery, Millerton, N.Y. 2018 The Hotchkiss library, Sharon, Ct featured artis t 2017 Open Your Eyes Studio Tour, NW Ct. Pandion Gallery, Fishers Island, N.Y.
2008 Eckert Fine Art, Kent , Ct. The Norfolk Library, solo show
2016 Washington Art Association
2007 The White Gallery, Lakeville, Ct. solo show
2015 The Norfolk Library 2014 Sanford Smith Fine Art, Great Barrington, Ma. featured artist Robert Andrew Parker selected Works, Washington Art Association, Washington
2009 Brick Walk Fine Art Palm Beach 3 Ct. Art, Now and Then, Eckert Fine Art, Kent, Ct.
2006 Vermont Studio Center artist grant residency 2005 The White Gallery, Lakeville, Ct. solo show Vermont Studio Center residency Depot, C t
2013 Sanford Smith Fine Art, Great Barrington, Ma. featured artist Washington Art Association featured artist Pandion Gallery Fishers Island, N.Y. Goddard College, Plainfield Vermont solo show 2012 Tremaine Gallery , Salisbury School, Salisbury, Ct. Eckert Fine Art, Kent, Ct.
2004 The Norfolk library, Norfolk, Ct. solo show 2003 Tremaine Gallery at Hotchkiss School Morgan Lehman Gallery, Lakeville, Ct. 2002 Morgan Lehman Gallery, Lakeville 2001 Tremaine Gallery, The Hotchkiss School 1999 The Norfolk Library, Norfolk, Ct. solo show 1997 1998 Eckert Fine Art, Naples Florida 1974 B.F.A., Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont
This catalogue has been produced on the occasion of the exhibition of “ Susan Rand: Recurring Dreams, ” June 25 th – July 25 th , 2026. All images © copyright Susan Rand, artist. Essays by Matthew Shamnoski and Lee Findlay Potter. Publication © Shamnoski Gallery. All rights reserved. Reproduction of contents prohibited. Shamnoski Gallery 115 East 72nd Street, #1B New York, NY 10021
© Susan Rand 2025
My sincerest thanks go to Lee Findlay Potter and Matt Shamnoski for all of their encouragement, support and friendship which gave me the confidence to keep going and dig deeper.