FUSION AND FAMILIAR FORM:

FUSION AND FAMILIAR FORM:

OBSERVATIONS ON ABSTRACTED ARTWORK BY SUSAN WASHINGTON

“The way the world is, is not necessarily the way it’s supposed to be. Start there.” –Berrisford Boothe

According to what is written about Susan Washington’s artwork, it is “the fusion of painting, collage and fashion.” In my recall, ‘fusion’ describes the directed intermingling, interweaving, and ‘mashing-up’ of non-aligned disciplines, practices, or forms. Fusion speaks to the irreversible melding of elements, or styles that the artists is attracted to, creates, or chooses to represent. The result of fusion is a new alloy – a new artistic voice. Consider the fact that each visual artist is really having a life-long conversation with him/herself about

aesthetics or beauty or a conceptual premise and the viewer has the privilege of seeing that private, personal discussion presented as art. Art then, is fundamentally the public presentation of an internal language of form(s). The abstract artist in particular, is always fashioning a new language fused by use and misuse of line, shape, color, patterns, and textures. These elements are stand-ins for experiences, emotions, and whatever is observed from the artist’s own life, history, passion(s), and beliefs, etc. Susan Washington continues to generate an amazingly effective and inspiring catalog of abstract art.

earlier and very popular abstract collaged paintings, Susan as artist elects to continually fold in the ‘physics’ –the push and pull, the anguished drama of surface relationships - of what is notyet-understood. She is so good, because she is so brave. By being relentlessly and at times joyously dissatisfied with each amazingly competent evolution of her work, Susan continues to create new visual fusions; art that speaks with such fresh aesthetic potency that I know she sometimes has to teach herself to listen and recognize her own voice. Once she convinces herself to believe in the unfamiliar, to be patient with what she doesn’t yet understand, Susan always brazenly fuses forward - even more. She refreshes her compositional lens and by doing so, creates new clusters of tensioned and co-dependent elemental beauty. She extrapolates more and more.

Her faith in herself, in her own artistic voice to construct successful compositional harmony means that she -not any particular ‘ism’- is the connective tissue that allows aesthetic magic to happen. That is why I have an endless attraction to her work. That is why I believe her to be one of the best emerging 21st-century abstract painters. Painting after painting, she swings from mastery of invented compositions, to mastery of breathing color fields, to revisiting and unpacking the processes she successfully used as collage in her earlier works.

She digs in the ‘pigment dirt’ better than any other contemporary purely abstract artist I know.

There is another way that Susan Washington’s art surpasses normal medium-in-service to form practices. Susan has mad improvisational skills with the media she uses. Anyone who has practiced improvisation as art, knows that successful improvisation (ironically) requires a structural layout, a conceptual setting, an intuitive understanding of where and when deviation

is necessary and where and when it must be reintroduced, rubbed, scraped or drawn back into an uncertain process that only reveals a final form as a function of time. From her earlier ‘structure and void,’ sewing patterns-based derivative work, to her poetic, gritty, “urban” and breathtaking current works, Susan always manipulates the surface to activate and define incredible sculptural and illusory space. All of her work, even the most pensive, is mesmerizing. Static elements shift. Negative spaces can suddenly lunge forward and as perception shifts, adjacent shapes are triggered to betray their own initial compositional positions. It is a fascinating surrender to fall into her paintings. Her work is so wonderfully tweaked and directed by unfiltered intelligence that Susan’s greatest gift to the viewer may be their immediate sense of increased perceptual intelligence and sensitivity. Susan makes us look – good.

Nestled in her ever-rolling domain of discovery, Susan Washington is truly a committed and always practicing professional artist. She has built a mindset in practice where the constant is her courage to continually attempt wholly new expressions of spirit. This earned perspective has made Susan more comfortable and independent of the well-intentioned noise of fleeting admiration. The only truly meaningful fusion is the artist observant of him/herself. Susan Washington’s authentic art fuses painting, collage, along with a familial and personal interest in elements and history of fashion. It is also the ongoing evidence of a larger immutable arc of simply beautiful art from an accomplished artist who spends her life inventing and reinventing her own artist’s voice.

-Berrisford Boothe

5Artist, Art Professor Curator, Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of Art

Oil, ink and paper on canvas | 60 x 48 MODERN SOUL

YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT Oil and paper on canvas | 36 x 36