Subway Sonnet #2 | On Love Painting

Painting canvas is 36'x36, paper, oil and ink on canvas, UV protective varnish, ready to hang. I am creating a visual narrative of my recollection growing up in Brooklyn and NYC in the 70s and 80s, flanked by stainless steel, aluminum and graffiti, subway cars, telephone booths, rolling stainless steel gates pulled down adorned with graffiti. Mark-making in these paintings emulates the process by which all these metallic surfaces became the backdrop for the graphic history of those neighborhoods as they became adorned with the textural and visual imagery. In this environment the sharpie, self-adhesive sticker, pasted hand-bill and aerosol paint can can quickly communicate and homogeneously populate an entire neighborhood overnight promoting local punk rock bands and their gigs, political messaging, self-expression and the advertisement of services. "Susan's paintings feel as if they have been created by random collaboration in the same way as a public call box becomes quickly filled up with stickers and graffiti placed there by individuals and teams of street marketers. Her surface is archaeological, stratified with graphic artifacts as some, previously placed, are torn away and others overlaid upon existing iconography. The picture plane is scratched and eroded and scrawled upon. Song lyrics and Shakespearean quotes share the same space with philosophy and street slang. There is rough poetry in the un-painterly rhythm and coarseness of this approach." In this piece I tie together imagery with a particular mantra of love. But these are not the trite inspirational memes sold in home decor stores, instead drawn from the the language of post-war American art and especially the Pop Art Movement to which I pay homage to a choice of imagery. Woven throughout the oil paint are images from icons of world's relgion, philosophies, pictures torn from art and fashion magazines and lyrics from my favorite songs. It’s about affirmation, from the cave painters of Western Europe who crawled into dark recesses to leave their ocher hand prints to the graffiti artists who tag their names on subway walls and across the city, its the same need to leave your mark that drives street art. Affirmation is also found in mantras, spells and the lyrics of popular music and I can close my eyes in the studio, listening to a favorite track and see the energy of the city in my mind’s eye and that pushes me to paint what I feel and to roughly organize the narrative of the painting to fit a particular theme.

Painting:oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:36 W x 36 H x 2 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.