Susan Washington Fine Art

S US A N

W ASH I N G T ON

F I N E

A RT

“ I was so tired I just wanted to sleep.

But I wanted to paint more than I wanted to sleep.”

Susan Washington

www.susanwashingtonfineart.com Reproduction or use of any of the contents is strictly prohibited.

FUSION AND FAMILIAR FORM Observations on Abstracted Artwork

The way the world is, is not necessarily the way it’s supposed to be. Start there.

According to what is written about Susan Washington’s artwork, it is “the fusion of painting, collage and fashion.” In my recall, ‘fusion’ describes the directed intermingling, interweaving, and ‘mashing-up’ of nonaligned disciplines, practices, or forms. Fusion speaks to the irreversible melding of elements, or styles that the artist is attracted to, creates, or chooses to represent. The result of fusion is a new alloy – a new artistic voice. Consider the fact that each visual artist is really having a life-long conversation with him/herself about aesthetics or beauty or a conceptual premise and the viewer has the privilege of seeing that private, personal discussion presented as art. Art then, is fundamentally the public presentation of an internal

language of form(s). The abstract artist in particular, is always fashioning a new language fused by use and misuse of line, shape, color, patterns, and textures. These elements are stand-ins for experiences, emotions, and whatever is observed from the artist’s own life, history, passion(s), and beliefs, etc.

Susan Washington continues to generate an amazingly effective and inspiring catalog of abstract art.

Rather than comfortably and predictably settling for ‘speaking’ in the language of her stunning earlier and very popular abstract collaged paintings, Susan as artist elects to continually fold in the ‘physics’ –the push and pull, the anguished drama of surface relationships - of what is not-yet-understood. She is so good, because she is so brave. By being relentlessly and at times joyously dissatisfied

with each amazingly competent evolution of her work, Susan continues to create new visual fusions; art that speaks with such fresh aesthetic potency that I know she sometimes has to teach her-self to listen and recognize her own voice. Once she convinces herself to believe in the unfamiliar, to be patient with what she doesn’t yet understand, Susan always brazenly fuses forward - even more.

She refreshes her compositional lens and by doing so, creates new clusters of tensioned and co-dependent elemental beauty. She extrapolates more and more.

Her faith in herself, in her own artistic voice to construct successful compositional harmony means that she - not any particular ‘ism’- is the connective tissue that allows aesthetic magic to happen. That is why I have an endless attraction to her work. That is why I believe her to be one of the best emerging 21st-century abstract painters. Painting after painting, she swings from mastery of invented compositions, to mastery of breathing color fields, to revisiting and unpacking the processes she successfully used as collage in her earlier works.

She digs in the ‘pigment dirt’ better than any other contemporary purely abstract artist I know.

There is another way that Susan Washington’s art surpasses normal medium-in-service to form practices. Susan has mad improvisational skills with the media she uses. Anyone who has practiced improvisation as art, knows that successful improvisation (ironically) requires a structural layout, a conceptual setting, an intuitive understanding of where and when deviation is necessary and where and when it must be reintroduced, rubbed, scraped or drawn back into an uncertain process that only reveals a final form as a function of time.

From her earlier ‘structure and void,’ sewing patterns-based derivative work, to her poetic, gritty, “urban” and breathtaking current

works, Susan always manipulates the surface to activate and define incredible sculptural and illusory space. All of her work, even the most pensive, is mesmerizing. Static elements shift. Negative spaces can suddenly lunge forward and as perception shifts, adjacent shapes are triggered to betray their own initial compositional positions. It is a fascinating surrender to fall into her paintings. Her work is so wonderfully tweaked and directed by unfiltered intelligence that Susan’s greatest gift to the viewer may be their immediate sense of increased perceptual intelligence and sensitivity. Susan makes us look – good.

Nestled in her ever-rolling domain of discovery, Susan Washington is truly a committed and always practicing professional artist.

She has built a mindset in practice where the constant is her courage to continually attempt wholly new expressions of spirit. This earned perspective has made Susan more comfortable and independent of the well-intentioned noise of fleeting admiration. The only truly meaningful fusion is the artist observant of him/herself. Susan Washington’s authentic art fuses painting, collage, along with a familial and personal interest in elements and history of fashion. It is also the ongoing evidence of a larger immutable arc of simply beautiful art from an accomplished artist who spends her life inventing and reinventing her own artist’s voice.

Written by Berrisford Boothe Artist, Art Professor, Curator, Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of Art

SUSAN WASHINGTON Susan Washington is an abstract painter originally from Brooklyn, NY. She comes from a family of painters and though she has painted all her life, she made her career in the fashion industry in NYC for 20 years before relocating to the Pocono Mountains to become a full-time painter. Susan went to art school at the age of 45, but when she combined her business and entrepreneurial skills with her first cohesive body of work she successfully sold out of all of her works. Susan then made the decision to leave art school and focus on her art career.

She relocated to Baltimore in April of 2021 where she has a large studio on W. Pratt Street. She continues to be commissioned for works in the series and spends several hours a day marketing her work and building relationships. She is starting a mentorship program to pay forward and help female artists in the Baltimore area, by sharing her experiences with artists who can apply these entrepreneurial skills to their own art practice so they can create a successful and sustainable art business

BALTIMORE STUDIO

ARTIST STATEMENT “I never considered myself a storyteller, until I did.”

My paintings are visual narratives of my experiences, of love, of places (existent and non-existent), of emotions and of memories I recall from growing up in New York in the late 70s and 80s.

The surfaces are derived from memories of the rusted subway car, the public telephone booths, rolling steel cages that secure neighborhood stores after closing.

The mark-making in these paintings emulates the process by which all these metallic surfaces become the backdrop for the graphic history of the neighborhoods.

“The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls” - Sounds of Silence, 1964.

In this environment, the sharpie, self-adhesive sticker, pasted hand-bill and aerosol paint can quickly communicate and populate an entire neighborhood overnight: promoting local punk rock bands and their gigs, political messaging, self-expression and the advertisement of services from 24-hour plumbers to local sex workers.

My paintings feel as if they have been created by random collaboration in the same way public telephone booths and trains quickly filled up with stickers and graffiti. The surface is archaeological, stratified with graphic artifacts as some, previously placed, are torn away and others overlaid upon existing iconography. The picture plane is scratched and eroded and scrawled upon. Song lyrics and Shakespearean quotes share the same space with philosophy and street slang. There is rough poetry in the un-painterly rhythm and coarseness of this approach.

I have tied together all of the imagery and text to imbue each painting with a particular and specific mantra that ranges from “fame” and “success” to “love” and “prosperity”. I pay homage to post-war American art and the neo-expressionists.

Icons from the world’s religions and philosophies, pictures torn from art and fashion magazines and references to lyrics from my favorite bands find their way on my canvas. All paintings are created on canvas using oil paint, spray paint and paper.

- Susan Washington

SUBWAY SONNET #1 | ON LOVE 48 x 48

SUBWAY SONNET #7 | ON STRENGTH 30 x 40

SUBWAY SONNET #8 | ON LOVE 36 x 54

SUBWAY SONNET #9 | GOOD FORTUNE 36 x 48

SUBWAY SONNET #10 | ON LOVE 36 x 48

SUBWAY SONNET #11 | JERSEY GIRL 48 x 60

SUBWAY SONNET #15 | ON LOVE 60 x 40

SUBWAY SONNET #17 | ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE 30 x 40

SUBWAY SONNET #18 | HEALTH IS WEALTH 30 x 40

SUBWAY SONNET #21 | ON HAPPINESS 36 x 48

SUBWAY SONNET #28 | THE PASSENGER 48 x 60

SUBWAY SONNET #29 | DREAMER 36 x 48

SUBWAY SONNET #30 | NOTHING BUT FLOWERS 30 x 40

SUBWAY SONNET #34 | ON LOVE 36 x 48

SUBWAY SONNET #35 | ALL SHINE ON 36 x 48

SUBWAY SONNET #37 | LADYBOSS 48 x 48

SUBWAY SONNET #38 |LADYBOSS 60 x 48

SUBWAY SONNET #41 | STRONG WOMEN 30 x 40

SUBWAY SONNET #43 | BROOKLYN 60 x 60

SUBWAY SONNET #44 | DREAMS 36 x 48

SUBWAY SONNET #45 | NEW DAY 30 x 40

SUBWAY SONNET #46 | BROOKLYN 48 x 48

SUBWAY SONNET #47 | ON LOVE 36 x 48

SUBWAY SONNET #48 | THE CITY 36 x 48

SUBWAY SONNET #49 |CITIES 72 x 72

SUBWAY SONNET #50 | STRONG WOMEN 36 x 48

www.susanwashingtonfineart.com susan@susanwashingtonfineart.com IG: @susanwashingtonart 570-242-5404

Studio & Gallery Visits by Appointment 1101 W. Pratt Street, Baltimore MD 21223

Catalog designed by Sierra Faish https://sierrafaish.myportfolio.com/