Artist Statement:
"I am drawn to natural organic forms for their inherently irregular shapes,the range and beauty of their colors and the fleeting nature in their existence."
..Susan Newman refers back to Cezanne and his sources to re-personalize still life as an art form.While she frequently uses a Cezanne-like, blonde light to illuminate the edible and floral forms she paints, her ambience is gentler and more sensuous. The sense of light in her painting is one way of expressing her mind set about her subject:Ms. Newman prefers to enjoy the rich textures of the paint itself. Rather than being a record of a specific set of objects in a specific ambience that the viewer might experience in nature... Ms. Newman’s still life subjects are pints of departure for essays on color, form and light. She makes very little attempts to seduce the eye into regarding the “pearness” of a pear, for example. The viewer is not invited to smell the oranges or the roses portrayed in her paintings. Instead, Susan Newman gives the viewer something of her view of life. The humble turnip becomes a subject imbues with integrity and a knowledge of a previous life, before it was pulled from its home and it’s elaborate plumage was separated from it. The vitality of the life forms in each still life reinforced by their painterly treatment and by the reflective light effects in the areas immediately adjacent to them. These objects have a real existence and friendly immediacy that invites the viewer to know them as painted subjects. Until September 11, 2001, a regard for the fragility of life was often overlooked, even in fine art. Susan Newman calls upon us to appreciate that we have for what it is. A painted sunflower is not a sunflower, it is painting. Nothing more, and certainly, nothing less.
Pamela Hoyle
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