"SUT &WFOUT MOUNTAIN VIEW VOICE
SECTION
"SUJTU
turned adventurer
By Rebecca Wallace
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now in August. Grizzly bears pawing the moss for food. Icebergs and ice cliffs and a raucous river. In the middle of it all, there was Sukey Bryan, unscrolling thick rolls of paper on the ground to draw and paint Alaska. She was doing a 10-day artist residency in the Denali National Park and Preserve, gathering sketches and quick acrylic paintings that she would later use to create her oil paintings and prints back in her Stanford home studio. She was also taking photos, thousands of them. “It was such a profound feeling to be alone in such wild immensity. I just can’t shake it,” Bryan later wrote in an artist’s statement. Three years later, those 10 days continue to yield rich inspiration for Bryan, as seen in her prints and giant paintings of ice formations, waterfalls, peaks, rivers and snow. She’s exhibiting several works this fall at the Community School of Music and Arts in Mountain View in a Mohr Gallery solo show called “Glacier Works.”
Sukey Bryan
DRAMATIC, ICY IMAGES COME FROM STANFORD PAINTER’S TIME IN A REMOTE ALASKA CABIN
The show runs through Nov. 27 at CSMA, 230 San Antonio Circle. Works will include “Ice Walls,” a triptych of oil paintings depicting the chilly blues of ice walls above a river floating with ice chunks. The darknesses buried in the blues hint at the cliffs’ depths, the silt in the ice and the mud in the water. “The ice has a strangeness to it,” Bryan says in her studio, a converted, comfortably large garage with natural light and sweeping white walls. “It’s quite beautiful.” To help capture her subject’s layers, Bryan starts her canvases by painting them an earthy brown. She’ll spread a canvas out on the floor and go at it with large brushes. Later, she tacks it to the wall, often waiting a few days for each layer of oil paint to dry, and still later in the process it gets stretched over a frame. When a painting gets really tall, she has to climb up and down a ladder to work on it. It’s a warm afternoon in the studio, but Bryan still seems to see Alaska vividly — in her art around her, and in her recollections of her 2008 artist residency. When Bryan, a full-time artist with a master of fine arts degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art, applied for the residency, she had never Continued on next page NOVEMBER 4, 2011 ■ MOUNTAIN VIEW VOICE ■
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