Statement 2022
Color like a thought that grows out of a mood... Wallace Stevens
Over the past decade, I have developed a process of pouring layers of tinted polymer on panel that has expanded the breadth of what I can achieve with color and surface in my abstract works. After pouring the tinted polymer, I manipulate the panel so the paint collects or cracks. The poured polymer mimics nature: a layer of polymer hardens like ice or mud —its thickness and viscosity impacting how the surface dries. The variations on the surface and the quality of the color are the result of a delicate and flexible relationship between control and accident. I assemble the poured panels into specifically calibrated horizontal or vertical sequences, creating a narrative of color, space, and light. The surfaces range from dull to glossy, either absorbing or reflecting the light, existing always in relationship to the light in the room and the position of the viewer.
My color choices represent an intersection of outside and inside. Often a color idea comes from an experience of a place or moment in time. As a point of departure, this enters the internal world of a painting and begins a life of its own. 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.
Introduction to Vertical Landscapes Catalogue 2014
by Carter Ratcliff
Susan English made the most recent works in this exhibition by assembling small painted panels in wide, horizontal sequences. Some of these panels are dark and absorbent. Others catch the light and modulate it with subtle interplays of color and tone. All her panels, even the most luminous, have the solid presence of palpable facts; and each painting’s procession has an air of inevitability, like the events in the sort of narrative that advances confidently to a satisfying conclusion. These works possess, in a word, unity. Moreover, their unity has an origin—one could even say, an ancestry—for English’s panels are up-to-the-moment descendants of the monochrome paintings that epitomize early modernism’s ideal of unified form.
In 1915, Kasimir Malevich painted Black Square, following it three years later with Suprematist Composition White on White. In the following decade, Władysław Strzemiński painted all-white canvases under the banner of Unism. The British avant-gardist Ben Nicholson made white-on-white reliefs in the 1930s, and two decades later, when Ad Reinhardt painted the first of his black canvases, the monochrome canvas had become a well-established option: a genre of abstract painting. English contributes to this history with the paintings in her Aequora: Poured series, several of which are on view here.
Malevich’s Black Square presents a single, uninflected expanse of black. In Reinhardt’s black paintings, there are always four shades of the prevailing hue, one in each of the four quadrants of the canvas. The image is thus tightly enclosed within the geometry of the rectangular surface. English, by contrast, opens that geometry to the allusions she produces by pouring paint over tilted surfaces. As she says in a statement from 2010, the flow and eventual solidification of her colors resembles that of water freezing to ice or mud hardening to stable ground. Yet there is nothing muddy about her imagery. Mixing pigment into a transparent acrylic medium, she shows us physical things interacting with the light that renders them visible. Following the modulations of hue across the surface of a painting in the Aequora series, we see light condensed into something almost tangible. Yet these panels also feel expansive, for their scale is infinitely flexible. Some of them look like vast portions of sky.
Despite her monochrome roots, English was never devoted to the stark oneness Strzemiński celebrated with the word “Unism.” Perhaps she saw oneness as an ideal not to be cultivated but overcome. Monochrome appears in her paintings as a kind of memory, a premise left behind as its possibilities are realized—as, for example, pigment accumulates along the edge of a poured panel and darkens to the point where it almost seems as if a new color has emerged. Geographies of cracks and fissures give certain panels the feel of landscapes. Each panel is rife with implications and when English combines them into larger works, she multiplies their multiplicities. In addition, she creates puzzles with “vertical landscape,” a phrase that recurs often in the titles of her multi-paneled works. Why attach the word “vertical” to paintings that are so emphatically horizontal?
The answer lies the buildups of pigment mentioned earlier. Reminders of the part gravity plays in the artist’s method, these areas of intensified color appear first along the lower edges of her panels—than along the upper edges, as she rotates the panels one-hundred and eighty degrees for inclusion in the Aequora series. In the more recent, multi-paneled paintings, the pigment buildups run along the sides of the panels, for English rotates them by only ninety degrees before joining them together. Thus, horizontal reminders of her process become vertical markers in intricately inflected compositions. And they inspire echoes: vertical color-strips the artist on after the original surfaces have dried. With monochrome as her premise, English has found her way to a style of abstraction rich with implication and alive with drama.
Blue, 2014, begins on an ambiguous note. The leftmost panel looks dark against the airily blue one just to its right, and yet it looks light in contrast the blackish strip that comes next. With these tonal shifts as her theme, English plays a series of variations that evoke a particularly complex and engaging episode in the life of the color blue. Because that life is strictly visual, we make more sense of this painting by looking than by talking. Nonetheless, it is worth noting the impact of the two dark panels, their surfaces freighted with heavy streaks of pigment, that appear two-thirds of the way to the right. Coming after the flickering delicacy of earlier passages, they feel monumental—and possibly ominous. As the painting moves to its conclusion, lighter tones reappear. This reprise is optimistic and yet shadowed, perhaps, by the visually massive presence of the dark panels.
The danger built into English’s multi-paneled paintings is that they will turn out to be too wide for their height: the center will sag. Yet this never happens. Whether we view these works quickly or at a slow, contemplative tempo, they are sustained by the cogency of their pictorial logic, the coherence of what I have been calling their narratives. Of course, a painting’s panels are not words in a sentence. Nonetheless, we usually read them left to right. Reading them the other way, we find that coherence remains and everything else changes. As it happens, one of the artist’s statements tells of walking through the woods on the same path, repeatedly, and then reversing her direction and seeing her surroundings with new eyes.
A moment comes, however, when metaphors of narrative direction and logical progression fall away. It’s a moment anticipated by one of her titles: The middle is everywhere and everything, which suggests that, ultimately, English’s paintings have no beginnings and no endings. Everything in them, everything they mean, is present simultaneously. For she has not simply rejected the obvious unity of the monochrome surface. Embracing that obviousness, she has induced it to generate unities of a more elusive—and more challenging—kind.
Introduction to Periphery Catalogue 2019Stephen Westfall
Susan English’s Material Sublime, Stephen Westfall
Maine and Southern California bookend the lower 48 states and both have been home to distinctive, if antipodal movements in postwar American art. The Light and Space artists in and around Los Angeles abstracted the evanescent light-drenched effects of Southern California skies, horizons and architectures while Maine has hosted successive generations of painters devoted to a representation of landscape that is more tactile, while remaining invested in the play of light over the ocean, rocks, and lakes. Susan English revisits her family’s home in Maine every summer and is subject to the same inspiration of watching the light play on the tumbled rocks of the Maine coast and the more elemental division of sea and sky beyond the coastal islands. Most of the year, however, she resides north of New York City, not too far from Dia Beacon, where she first encountered the work of the quintessential Light and Space artist, Robert Irwin, who before the installation of his walk-thru Homage to the Square3 in 2015 was everywhere and nowhere throughout the huge factory plant and grounds of Dia Beacon as a consultant to the architects Rice+Lipka in the renovation of the building and the lighting from the windows; and as the principal designer of the landscaping. English has been drawn to the Light and Space artists ever since, but as a painter she sought the means of converting light back into matter, the material of paint.
A few years ago English figured out how to construct a movable barrier to hold successive pours of nearly transparent polymer medium imbued with pigment. The support structure is rigid—aluminum sheeting on wood panel—so she can lift the structure and let one translucent color sag into the still drying body of another. She then assembles the panels into complete paintings as a stack of two or three horizontals, but sometimes as a horizontal “frieze” of verticals or even a single monochrome panel. As physically engaging as her process is, the effect is that of luminous, windless, hovering veils imbued with daylight. The horizontal compositions immediately bring us to the landscapes of barren places: open water, the desert, and polar ice floes. The dilutions of her color are uncanny in their gradations, so that most of the time we have the initial impression that we are looking at light as atmosphere . . . most of the time. It’s at the edges that the materiality of the paint asserts itself in buildups of deeper darks and in some cases lights, as the paint builds up where it met a barrier. In those moments we can have the distinct feeling that we are looking less at a depiction of a natural phenomenon than we are at film.
A brief but important digression that will inform where we’re headed: English’s paintings invoke a lineage of Abstract Expressionist ties to the Romantic landscape painters, particularly Friedrich and, later, Turner, which the great art historian Robert Rosenblum first connected to the work of Newman, Still, Rothko, and Pollock.1 Following the artists Rosenblum cites, a case could certainly be made for Agnes Martin’s post-grid paintings of horizontal intervals, which can be seen partly as essentializations of her Canadian prairie childhood and her vistas in northern New Mexico. And for Brice Marden’s early encaustic monochromes, particularly the Grove Group (1972-73) and Nebraska (1966). But I think film is the wild card analogy for an even closer looking at English’s paintings. For even as they extend the evanescent atmospheres of the Romantic sublime, they do so as a polymer material that we can sink our teeth into. “Film,” here, has at least two connotations: film as material, including a residual “filminess” that can go so far as to suggest organic fluids; and the light projected through film which has been given an abstract structure by Stan Brakhage and Paul Sharits, among other experimental filmmakers. English’s coaxing of a blood-orange cerise craquelure to rise above its own dark staining into the pungent green below the central horizon of Glance feels like an act of languorous violence worthy of a Mallarme sunset, but it also recalls the textures of a Brakhage film still. At the same time, the multiple horizontal or vertical breaks in her multi-panel paintings induce a stilled, painting version of the shutter stammer of colors that Sharits induced into his film projections. A stammer that goes back to Muybridge’s breakdowns of animal and human motion. In English’s work the motion is in our own shifting aspects as we move around the paintings while seeking to gaze into them to find their making and see if the light really is changing out of the corner of our eye. Paintings are still after all. They work on us slowly, which allows us the luxury of the kind of time it takes to remind us that Marden used a still from Godard’s Alphaville, of Lemy Caution on one side of an open door and Anna Karina on the other, for an exhibition announcement of his early diptychs. As the Godard image intimates and English’s paintings make fact in our own time, paintings are also bodies. Like the rest of us, they do better housed in architecture. Get back on English’s paintings and then come close. They have stories to tell and presences to disclose.