oil painting

Over the past few years, I painted a large number of 4" x 5" abstract landscapes in oil on birch panel that now inform my recent work. The tiny paintings provided me with an opportunity to quickly explore a wide range of color and mood. Using the mixed colors on my palette and a small knife, I held the panel in one hand while drawing the knife back and forth across the panel with the other hand. My hand kept moving, my mind was quiet. In fact, it was so quiet, I wasn't sure if it was quieter inside me or outside me. Quiet inside me is rare, so I just kept painting.

Soon, the image began to look like something deeply familiar to me, something in my DNA, something related to the places where I have lived and looked and travelled throughout my life. More than an actual place, though, the mood of that place, began to exert itself onto me. I was drawn in, my external world disappeared and I began to travel into that painted world, ask questions about it, accept it as a new, separate entity. After creating and sharing many of these tiny paintings, I felt ready to use them as guides for my larger work.

I find that same mood now, that mood that draws me in and holds me in delicious thrall to the knife, lovingly sweeping my whole arm now back and forth across the canvas, expressing the deep looking I've saved up over my whole life.

Contact Info:

phone: (415) 497-0697
email: susan@susanmccormick.com

websites:
www.susanmccormick.com
www.tinydeskart.com

studio hours: many weekday afternoons and by appointment