Susan Cantrick

About

Susan Cantrick is an American abstract painter whose primary interest is in painting as a structured visual response to sub-linguistic thinking. Her paintings are analogs of her pre-verbal perception that aim to be as articulate as possible, crystallizing the vitality and complexity of emergent cognition.She lives and works in Paris, France Education Cantrick came to the visual arts by way of music, which she studied in the U.S. (B.A. Bennington College, M.A. Peabody Conservatory of Music, Baltimore, MD) and practiced, as a violinist, for over 15 years in both the U.S. and France, where she has lived since 1990. In 1997, facing chronic tendonitis, she transitioned her creative practice from violin to visual art. She has been working from an independent studio in Paris since 2002. Cantrick spent a winter residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2004. Technique Cantrick's essentially modernist painterly techniques, merging the gestural with the hard-edged, are mediated by post-modern digital interventions. Her hybrid practice favors a stylistic eclecticism that can belie its coherent underpinnings. The various processes she explores in her work combine elements of structure and freedom. ... For the last 10 years, she has been painting from digital studies that are generated from photo-fragments of her previous work. The results resemble what she characterizes as "a gamut of genealogies," paintings that share a common visual ancestry with their predecessors. She recently embarked on the challenge of returning to previously unfinished works, proceeding with new compositions imposed on the already inhabited space. Her various approaches investigate painting as state of mind, process, and object, revealing a connection to ideas about context and the renewal of identity. Alongside her painting practice, Cantrick creates small-format collages mounted on paper and panel that are often composed of alternate applications of paint and ink-jet printed imagery. Inspiration Beyon