Today we’d like to introduce you to Sue Post.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
When I was twelve my family moved back into to New York City, and I eagerly traded in my bicycle for a bus or subway ride to throw pots at the 92nd St Y, draw from the model at the Art Students League, see Manet at the Met or a Satyajit Ray movie at MoMA, or go hear B.B. King at the Fillmore East. But what I encountered in the storefront galleries in empty streets downtown interested me like nothing I had ever seen in a museum, and without articulating it even to myself, I knew that I wanted to add to that conversation. Joel Shapiro, Elizabeth Murray, Jennifer Bartlett, Carl Andre. It took me another 30 years to find the time and space necessary to focus on my own work enough to explore, understand and develop what I cared most about expressing with paint.
As a young woman I was interested in drawing, painting, sculpting and pottery, studied with both Toshiko Takaezu and Elizabeth Murray in college and worked summers in the ceramics studio at Castle Hill Center for the Arts on Cape Cod. After graduating I taught arts and crafts and did small scale production pottery in a Cambridge studio/workshop. I married and we moved around the country as my husband pursued his career and the spare bedroom I used to paint in became a nursery. Eventually we settled back in the Boston area, with three young sons and _no_ spare bedrooms.
When our youngest entered preschool I wanted to begin painting again outside the house so as not to expose the kids to fumes, and found a shared studio in an old school that had been converted into artist studios. The Kendall Center for the Arts was destroyed by an electrical fire six years later, along with all my materials, archives and the paintings intended for an upcoming solo exhibition in Boston. I was kindly offered a short-term sublet of a huge studio in the South End, and eventually joined the River Street cooperative at Waltham Mills, where I have felt safe and comfortable working ever since, so paradoxically this disaster ended up being a positive experience for me. A few years later, after a couple of fruitful residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, I decided to pursue a graduate degree and earned my MFA in 2007 from Massachusetts College of Art and Design at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Since 2010 I have exhibited at The Painting Center gallery in New York City, and I am currently interested in finding a gallery to call ‘home’, here in Boston.
Please tell us about your art.
An early series of paintings of tree canopies is based on photographs I took of the tops of the trees that grew in the strip between the sidewalk and the street, is about finding wildness and freedom in the confines of suburbia.
Losing the photograph as a source, in search of non-objective painting, my Seven Line series is based on a composition arrived at through a systematic exploration of color interactions which broke down how and why I respond to what attracts me, visually. Beginning with a simple cross and growing in complexity into an irregular grid just large enough to require counting, these paintings exhibit a nuance and spatial activation that belies their hardedge geometry.
More recently, I have escaped the bounds of structure and returned to a form of depiction, with biomorphic abstraction and uncanny landscapes.
My goal is always to allow myself to be free of all constraints and influences that keep me from expressing myself authentically and honestly. My hope is that other people will share some of my interests and find my paintings worth looking at.
Do you have any advice for other artists? Any lessons you wished you learned earlier?
Find a supportive community in which you can do your own thing. Collaborate. Be open to feedback but apply with caution, and don’t take criticism personally.
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
I enjoy collaborative projects and will participate this fall with a loosely-knit collective in the exhibition Maniacs: Manic Episode Six, in Sacramento, CA. I also exhibit and curate as a member of The Painting Center, an artist-run gallery in Chelsea in New York City, where I will be having a solo exhibition this coming November. For direct enquiries I can be reached by email at spost@susanpost.com, and more information and images of my work can be found at the following websites:
http://susanpost.com/
https://www.thepaintingcenter.org/susan-post
https://www.artsy.net/the-painting-center/artist/sue-post
Contact Info:
- Address: River Street Artists
144 Moody Street, Bldg, 4
Waltham, MA 02453 - Website: www.susanpost.com
- Email: spost@susanpost.com
- Instagram: @suepost
- Other: https://www.saatchiart.com/sueart
Image Credit:
All images (c) Susan Post
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