Color like a thought that grows out of a mood... Wallace Stevens
“ Inside the highly charged relational realm of color, my responses and choices are visual, emotional, and intuitive. I play with the phenomenon of a color at the limit of itself. How far can green be pushed before it becomes blue? How many infinite directions can you push a brown or a gray or a white? In this tertiary area, colors hum in multiple ways like a harmony contained in a single note.
Color is never stable...it exists always in relationship to light and in a relational context to other colors—reactions to colors are personal and resonate with memories and feelings. As such it is a deep well of content to explore. For me, a painting reaches an end point when the cumulative phenomenon of surface and color cohere, reaching a state of beauty that resonates on multiple levels.”
Susan English’s practice is deeply involved with process and materiality. She has a unique method of pouring pigmented polymer on panels in a process that balances precise control and with accident and surprise. The polymer settles as it will, gathering in pools, striations and veils of color creating surfaces that are constantly changing as the light changes, slowly revealing subtle tonal gradations. The resulting paintings are meditative and at the same time, continually active, at once serene and dynamic.
Susan English has exhibited widely across the United States and received a fellowship from the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Ithaca, NY. She was Artist-in-Residence at Habitat for Artists, Garrison, NY. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Chronogram, and Abstract Art Online. English holds an MFA from Hunter College, New York and a BA from Hamilton College, Clinton, NY. She lives and works in Cold Spring, NY.