“Susan Stephenson: Inside-Outside”
February 22 – March 12
Reception: Friday, February 25, 5-7pm
Strata Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Established Member Susan Stephenson, titled Susan Stephenson: Inside-Outside
Best known for the panoramic oil paintings she develops on-site, Susan Stephenson transforms scenery from everyday life through an exploration of color and light. Determined in her practice of working from direct observation as much as possible, she embraces the contemporary world by responding to it in the most primal means she knows: she paints it in oils. Inspired by traffic lights, stop signs, or how sunlight hits the “do not pass” lines in the road, she navigates a line between attraction and unease – torn between lovely places that appeal to everyone and other locations deemed “un-paintable.”
She writes, “Instead of pretending that electric lines are nonexistent, I use them to break the sky into visual patterns, letting them catch the light and become orange against the blue arc of the atmosphere. Every day, people are bombarded with chances to see beauty in the mundane yet sleepwalk past them. Rather than wait a hundred years 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?”
Stephenson’s easy relationship with curvilinear perspective is partly due to growing up in a geodesic dome in her native Louisiana; after using the wraparound view for so many years, it now permeates her work. Similarly, the spatial relationships of landscape now define everything she develops, regardless of genre. This distinctive viewpoint is on display in the works on exhibit in Strata Gallery, an exhibition that includes artworks showing outdoor views as well as those developed indoors.
With a BFA from Louisiana Tech University and her MFA from Boston University, she lived in southern New England for over twenty years, dividing her time between teaching and painting. Stephenson now lives and works in California’s Central Valley, where she teaches at the California State University, Stanislaus.
Susan Stephenson, Sunday Afternoon, Turlock, oil on panel, 24” x 48”, 2019