The art works selected for this website were created between 2012 to 2022 in my studio in Kingston, New York, where I moved in 2005 after nearly 40 years of living and working in New York City. The move was live-changing—and I was ready for it.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I have always made art to better understand the world that I live in and how it shapes the way that I see, think, and feel. Initially, I found the bucolic landscape and the picturesque vistas of the Hudson Valley with its rich colors and golden light to be quite overwhelming. While I had no plans to take up traditional landscape painting, I was prepared to take a good look at my new surroundings, spend time reading about the history of the region and viewing the works of artists associated with the Hudson River School of Painting and contemporary times.
To get better acquainted with my surroundings and the terrain, I walked local trails, visited area parks and nature preserves, private and historic estates, and gardens, and wandered down country roads through farmlands and river towns. Inspired by art historian Simon Schama’s belief that “every landscape—forest, river or mountain—is a work of the mind, a repository of memories and obsessions of the people who gaze upon it”, I hoped that my efforts to become more familiar with my surroundings would deepen and bear fruit.
As sculptor, I was immediately drawn to the strong structural contours of the natural landscape and its configuration of shapes and forms. For me, those elements had the strongest visual appeal and would determine what details would be inscribed in my mind. The arc of daylight on the landforms, which dramatically changed their appearance over the course of the day, was another element that made a strong impression on me.
The invitation to enter the landscape came one day when I was walking in the Black Creek Preserve just south of Kingston. It was there that I experienced the landscape from the inside out. At each bend or crook in the path, a scenic view within the forest opened, one after another and I felt the quiet drama of the forest and the experience unfolding.
Thus began my contemplative study of the structural contours of the natural landscape and how the configuration of elements—shapes and forms—gave each setting its visual power. I noted the effects of light, water, and wind on natural forms and documented the ways in which they impact static objects such as trees and rocks, and buildings. This interplay between stasis and motion became an integral part of my sculpture.
The wall-mounted sculpture series that followed were designed to reduce complex landforms to simple minimalist motifs covered with bright, colorful encaustic paints. A second series experimented with printed, painterly depictions and photos of nature and patterns derived from the natural world. Then in the summer of 2016, I shifted gears to immerse myself in the art of paper folding, transforming flat sheets of paper and cardboard into three-dimensional, pop-up structures. I added color by painting simple hard edge geometric motifs on the front side of the paper pieces, and one color on the back of the sheet.
Late in 2018, I decided to radically change the way that I paint—from that of a hard-edge minimalist aesthetic to that of a freewheeling, and expressionist approach to better reflect the multitude of emotions that I was feeling. Whereas previously I had used geometry to dictate the rhythmic patterns of colored shapes that I painted across the sheet of paper, I now started by deliberately pouring and splattering of paint on and across a wet piece of watercolor paper, followed by a second and third loose application of paint around the edges of the paper to define the field of activity.
These painterly surfaces are in direct counterpoint to the exactness of the carefully engineered paper structures—the sculptural elements of the relief break up the painted surface and the painted image appears to hover over the flat plane below. The painted image appears to be in motion, never quite the same each time it is seen, appearing, and disappearing as the viewer changes their position, refusing to settle into any sense of permanence. The freestanding sculpture works in a similar fashion as the viewer moves around the fractured surface of the cut and folded cylindrical form.
I believe that I am now one with my work and I am excited by what appears the limitless trajectory of the work going forward. I am bursting with renewed energy to move forward.
Susan Spencer Crowe
06/07/2023