FALLS VILLAGE — Painter Suzan Scott’s comparison of words to colors explained the visual language she has developed over many years. “I love the thesaurus.” When she chooses a color, it is like finding a word in the thesaurus. And to her “words have color, and tone, and weight. Finding the right word, is like finding the right color.”
Attendees at her talk looked with interest through a notebook she passed around, a kind of catalog of color, two or three rectangles on each page which she painted in solid, subtle tones using gouache. This was one of her books of visual syntax, demonstrating how sets of colors come together into an image the way words do in a sentence. “My language is line and color and shape. They are my voice made visible.”
How has she built her visual language? She remembers her delight when, as a child she finally was given“ a pad, a book of blank paper!” “All of this is very personal to me.” “I paint wonder. It’s really a landscape, but I paint wonder.”
“There is so much more here than what we can see, if I can step back, maybe not try to name things but just experience them.”
She will often start a canvas in orange, her color for the earth under the grass. Her process becomes a meditation “about layers under the hill, layers of time, life lived there”, by “digging holes into hills with color.” And about clouds, trees, the seasons, weather, and the night sky. She has created a series of paintings on each. When she arranged in sequence 365 paintings she had done one year, she saw the sweep of color of the sky and earth over time.
She spoke of the artist Sol Lewitt with whom she had contact while organizing slides as Assistant to the Curator of the LeWitt Collection in Chester, Connecticut. She described him as a gentle, approachable man whose work with sequences, minimalism, and conceptual art deepened her realization of what can be represented in her work, “simplifying to get the essence of a thing.”
“Wonders are there — we just have to look. Each one of us has a specific view. Individual vision is a gift.”
Her show at Hunt Library, in Falls Village, This Beautiful Place, ended on March 13. Her website is www.suzanscott.com. Hunt Library: www.huntlibrary.org
Classic styles, bold colors, and creative concerts make up the “Imaginary Concerts” line at Peggy Mercury.Provided
Shirts from Peggy Mercury’s first fashion line, “Imaginary Concerts,” hang on display.Provided
