Susan's Artist’s Statement -

Painter Susan Spivack developed her early career as a successful designer in the field of decorative arts after graduating from New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology in the Sixties. It is too easy an answer to attribute the impact of color, texture and pattern that distinguish Spivack’s paintings today to her initial work in the design field. On the one hand, she readily acknowledges the stimulus and creative invigoration derived from this training but on the other Spivack notes the apparent paradox that such seemingly fixed rules should yield to the liberating and improvisatory nature so characteristic of her recent work. Her background in commercial design determined by innovation and replication could be considered an impediment but also a catalyst to work in the unorthodox manner that Spivack revels in – to break the predictable rules that are associated with watercolor as a medium.

“Teachers say that I like ‘to live dangerously,’” Spivack candidly admits. She has been fortunate to study with distinguished instructors, like Ann Toulmin-Rothe and Robert Baxter, who realized that individual creativity and technical skill come from imparting principles to students along with the confidence to find their own way to utilize them. Thus, the work becomes the student’s while the teachers are in a real sense facilitators – allowing students to work through problems and challenges on their own. Spivack is particularly grateful to this approach and the encouragement that she received because, “they helped unblock my inhibitions and allowed me to plunge into the subject matter with wild abandon… a personal indulgence in the pure pleasure of painting.”s uninhabited space and color tonalities. Design patterns insert themselves as complex points of contrast – yet never to the point of disturbance or

inconsistency. Motifs reach across the picture plane in layers and fuse through washes of vibrant color drawn together by Spivack’s treatment of the intervening space. She does this through suggestion and an intense feeling for interlocked color, line, pattern and space in which if any part were altered, it would change the overall effect. This fragile balance is like the natural landscape that she depicts – a poetic place where the unexpected co-exists with the impermanent.

Reality is the touchstone for Spivack’s figurative, landscape and still life compositions. As with music, once the initial note is played or the motif introduced, the work becomes more personal (more imaginary) and very adaptable to the lure of design and patterning so that it becomes an inner artistic dialogue of elements speaking to each other within the composition rather than being referential to something beyond the frame, the boundaries, the borders. Spivack explains that her goal “is to transform the ordinary into something stimulating to the eye… my application of color is largely intuitive. I never try to duplicate or imitate but rather give my subject a new life of its own.”

There are two pronounced tendencies in Spivack’s work: one is a more pictorial, patterned composition with lots of active space that offsets the figural components. In this work it appears that the figure or image becomes the defining element but space is equally crucial in terms of its activation through line and color. Spivack has said “If something has form, that is only part of it.” Forms are affected by the entire composition and the resultant emotional tension that charges both motifs and the space flowing around and between them.

The other tendency in her painting encompasses more abstraction through the use of flatter composition, less uninhabited space and color tonalities. Design patterns insert themselves as complex points of contrast – yet never to the point of disturbance or inconsistency. Motifs reach across the picture plane in layers and fuse through washes of vibrant color drawn together by Spivack’s treatment of the intervening space. She does this through suggestion and an intense feeling for interlocked color, line, pattern and space in which if any part were altered, it would change the overall effect. This fragile balance is like the natural landscape that she depicts – a poetic place where the unexpected co-exists with the impermanent.