Behind the Canvas
The Story of Susan Flaster
Susan Flaster is a third-generation artist. Her earliest memories are of her father’s art district gallery in San Francisco. Born in 1965, she found herself in the midst of a cultural explosion. Susan danced ballet and jazz for 13 years.
Although she continues to dance, now it is in front of large canvases and through her brush. Susan cannot paint without music, nor can she listen to music without grabbing a sketchbook. The music she danced to, along with the motion, colors, and moods, are what she feels and paints. This is why motion is the first sensation she creates.
Susan never begins a painting with an intention. She enters a tunneled awareness of light, color, objects, and sounds, allowing them to guide her wherever she is meant to go. Her work is a stream of consciousness, and she loses track of time while painting. If not for the canvas in front of her, she wouldn’t know where those hours had gone.
As she delves deeper into her day’s dream, Susan reaches back to nascent impressions of shapes and colors, rendering them as she first remembers them. The purity of the natural world becomes her vision, and wave after wave of shapes and colors are realized in layers over layers and dimensions.
Susan wants people to see and feel simultaneously rather than identifying the parts of the whole. She invites viewers to look at her work as an animation. In every part of the canvas, there is motion. Upon refocusing, one can sense that motion coming from different directions in a profusion of colors that draw them deeper into the undertow. Her paintings never appear the same way twice. As a tetrachromat, colors register differently for her, allowing Susan to work in minutely detailed color variations with shadows and variegated shades.
BICYCLES IN THE PARK©
Acrylic 60″ x 40″, 2020 | $15,000
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