SUSAN STEPHENSON
In panoramic oil paintings developed on site, I transform everyday scenery through an exploration of color and light. Torn between the lovely places that appeal to everyone and locations some might find un-paintable, I navigate a line between attraction and unease. Traffic lights and stop signs inspire me, along with the way sunlight hits the “do not pass” lines in the road. Instead of ignoring electric lines and telephone poles, they break my paintings’ skies into visual patterns, catching the light and becoming orange against the atmosphere. Every day, people are bombarded with chances to see beauty yet often sleepwalk past it; rather than wait for our culture to look back wistfully at some of the things we currently overlook, I prefer to show their beauty right now. Why wait?
My easy relationship with curvilinear perspective is partly due to growing up in a geodesic dome, and after twenty years of using the wraparound view, it now permeates my work. Similarly, the spatial relationships of landscape define my work regardless of genre. Finding equilibrium between a work’s formal relationships and a location’s visual cues has become a form of meditation, and as a result, balancing abstraction and reality now motivates my creativity. Ultimately, I look for a combination of modern life and scenery that sparks that peculiar blend of kooky and beautiful I find so compelling.