"Kansas Wheat", Acrylic on Canvas.
Susana B
Waves of Color: Colorized Landscapes
9 a.m.-5 p.m.
The McKellar Group Inc.
523 Grand, Suite 1D
Kansas City, MO
816.472.4700
Hours: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday
Runs through: April 3
Artist’s site: http://www.susanab.net
Gallery site: http://www.themckellargroup.com
Susana B’s Colorized Landscapes — the show itself and the paintings which comprise it — shouldn’t work.
B’s works, on display through Friday at The McKellar Group as part of the Arts Council of Metropolitan Kansas City’s “Now Showing” program, are identical in composition. In each of them, she serves up a big block of one color, topped by a smaller block of another.
The paintings lack a single identifying detail. No one is going to walk up to one of them, spot a distinctive landmark, and say, “I know that place.”
And the great majority of them are both vertical and narrow — the world as seen through a slit, rather than in panorama.
They shouldn’t work … but they do.
In large part, that’s due to B’s skillful blending of pigments (She mixes her acrylic paints directly on the canvas) and artistic influences.
Her most obvious nod is to Mark Rothko. Each of these paintings is, in effect, one color field atop another. B (short for Bruhn, by the way) acknowledges Rothko’s impact in her statement for this show: People can instantly like or dislike an item because of color, she writes; therefore color is rudimentary and reactive.
Later in her statement, there’s a third “R” word: Regionalism — especially as practiced by Grant Wood, who B also cites as an influence. Theirs is a kinship not of style but of home soil: Both painters grew up in northeastern Iowa.
Where Wood painted the inhabitants of the region in painstaking detail, however, B leaves out the people and strips the land itself down to the basics. Hue meets composition: a patch of blue, fading to white, over an expanse of greenish-gold. The two fields merge into one: grain ripening under a summer sky, with cumulus clouds on the horizon promising a late afternoon thunderstorm.
Where is all that happening? Anywhere the viewer wants it to.
The featureless aspect of B’s works, rather than being a weakness, is one of their biggest strengths. Because her landscapes evoke no sense of real place, people can adapt them to their own recollections — allowing each viewer to forge a private emotional link to the paintings.
A featureless field of Kansas Wheat (the painting at the top of this post) can call to mind summer visits to a beloved uncle’s farm — or hours spent riding a combine, making money to pay for another year of college. A Pink Sunset over rolling purple hills could remind one viewer of the evening he met his first love, another of her final night in her parents’ home.
More than any influence or technique, this is why B’s paintings work: In leaving details out of her canvases, she provides space for others to fill them in. Each viewer is a part of her creative blend.
These are as much our landscapes, painted with the brushes and colored with the pigments of memory, as they are hers.
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