{"id":640,"date":"2021-06-15T11:00:34","date_gmt":"2021-06-15T18:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/artlectureseries\/?p=640"},"modified":"2021-06-15T11:00:45","modified_gmt":"2021-06-15T18:00:45","slug":"week-6-susanna-bluhm-wednesday-october-31st-20181130-1pm-in-lecture-hall-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/artlectureseries\/week-6-susanna-bluhm-wednesday-october-31st-20181130-1pm-in-lecture-hall-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Week 6: Susanna Bluhm Wednesday, October 31st 2018,11:30-1pm in Lecture Hall 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From\u00a0Susanna<\/a>\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My paintings are usually related in some way to my physical environments and experience of them. Source material I draw from when I\u2019m painting often includes photographs I\u2019ve taken of places I\u2019ve been. Also, the paintings are experiments in creating new environments. An individual painting can become a new place in itself, with sensations of things that might happen in a place, such as weather, touch, landscape, temperature, sex or noise. Abstract marks interact with more recognizable shapes, and a kind of narrative ensues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When talking or writing about my work, I stray from defining the narratives in a literal way. Instead, I try to describe them as I see them, both as the person that made them and decided they make sense, and also as a witness to the end result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Semi-abstract \u201ccharacters\u201d show up in the paintings and suggest meanings with their repetition and associations with each other. For example, a chunk of green and white stripes has its origins in the green and white striped pajama bottoms from Suzanne Valadon\u2019s The Blue Room, <\/em>1923. To me, this \u201ccharacter\u201d feels like a queer, feminist reclaiming of the history of painting. A pink fir tree is an odd, out-of-place Pacific Northwestern interloper and solo eloper in the big city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Making these semi-abstract landscape-based paintings with a personal narrative running underneath is a three-pronged effort. I am looking at my agency in the landscape. I am trying to spend more time in the place by painting it. I\u2019m using paint to make physical contact again. In this intimate way, the paintings explore landscape as a lover and loved one, enmeshed with the paint, and without the safe distance usually afforded by the Sublime in traditional Western landscape painting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think of both painting and looking as pleasureful experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Susanna Bluhm 2018<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BIO:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Susanna Bluhm is an artist based in Seattle, WA. After growing up in a suburb of Los Angeles, she earned her BA in Studio Art from California State University Humboldt and her MFA in Painting from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and at the Karl Hofer Gesellschaft in Berlin. Bluhm was a member of SOIL artist-run gallery (Seattle) for five years, and was the 2014 recipient of the Neddy Artist Award in Painting. She lives with her wife and ten-year-old son in Seattle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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