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About The Artist
Sue Grace
My current body of painting is informed by the shifting
forces of our daily lives - the collisions, the doubling back, the affirmations
- all play out in my shapes and colors and mirror the shifts of our psyche.
Our inner life is reflected, in particular the roles of gender, in the
juxtaposition of biomorphic and geometric shapes, the obstructions and flow in
the work and the anatomical shapes inspired by women’s bodies.
Marks and layers crisscross the painting much as skin sheds
and regenerates. I work to achieve a balance between the inner world and the
materiality of the paint.
Inspiration
What
keeps me coming back to the studio? Painting is like the game we played as kids, the
Rubik Cube; the handheld toy cube offered endless potential solutions. The
rectangle of the picture plane offers the same tantalizing challenges “How can I
manipulate the composition to avoid figure and ground or to push one forward
over the other?” Ultimately the colliding shapes, the movement and the color
crisscross across the picture plane and leave traces of my painting process that
isn’t a story or a rendering but a series of improvisations, decisions, and mistakes that reflect daily life.
Techniques
I work with the traditional material of paint on a support. I like to work in a series to help me develop ideas fully and keep a flow of constant work - sometimes with brushes and sometimes with the cruder tools of hands, collage, and drips. My process is improvisational; I begin with marks, shapes or choices of colors and these decisions in turn begin to form a language within the piece. It is a language all its own and becomes more complex as I manipulate figure and ground: adding more of the figure or less of the ground in a push and pull relationship until the work feels "just right."
career highlights
I have had exhibitions in the Hillyer Art Space (Washington DC), McLean Project for the Arts (Maryland), The Workhouse Arts Center (Virginia), Target Gallery (Virginia), Crossroads Gallery (Virginia), Northern Virginia Community College and the Florence Trust (London, England). In 2020 I was the featured artist for the Georgetown Lombardi Arts and Humanities Program, Washington DC. In 2014 I was juried into the Artist Residency Program at the Workhouse Arts Center where my work was selected to permanently decorate the exterior of Historical Building in the form of 15 foot banners that reproduce my work. I have work in private collections in New York, Virginia, Maryland, Washington Dc and Los Angeles, California.
