SUZAN WOODRUFF
Artist Statement
Einstein said, “Look deep into nature, then you will understand everything better.”
In a system developed over two decades, my process incorporates observation (nature), study (physics) and practice (meditation) into a dynamic creative system of "controlled chaos" that generates pattern formation. I combine properties of topological mixing (pigment and viscosity of media), water, gravity, erosion, wind, and period orbits to recreate natural phenomena with fractal features on gessoed panel. These “strange attractors” are paint waves and disturbances that, through the energy created by the movement of my easel, oscillate along the panel surface creating the characteristics of a pattern created by a body of water, and the nacreous powders create the illusion of emergent structures in nature.
Another influence on my work is light as a refractive and fracturing tool appropriated from the ideas of kintsukuroi – “the piece is more beautiful for having been broken.” With my new pieces, I have combined my methods of painting using the Gravity Easel and casting the flat pieces, and framing them on a transparent acrylic box. With the sculptural cast atmospheric globes, I am furthering my desire to delve more deeply into the various Properties of Light in art. As always I am inspired by the words of Leonard Cohen "There is a crack in everything . That's how the light gets in.”
Suzan Woodruff was born in Phoenix, AZ. From an early age, she began exploring the southwestern desert first on foot then on motorcycle, immersing herself in infinite spaces and spectacular natural vistas that would later become essential to her art. She was raised by her gold-prospector grandparents who taught her how to “read” rocks and by her mother, who lived a distinctly desert-bohemian lifestyle . She remains an avid hiker, biker, surf boarder and reader of rocks as well as books. Woodruff received an art scholarship to attend Arizona State University working as a printmaker, painter, and sculptor. She soon began exhibiting her work and getting recognition internationally and left Arizona for Los Angeles and New York.
Currently, she resides in Los Angeles with her husband writer Bruce Bauman where Woodruff continues her immersion of art and nature of the sublime. Informed with the new and old knowledge of nature, space and science, her goal is to capture even strand of the cosmic web and, as stated by the writer Josh Jones when speaking of the sublime, "to be so absorbed, so stricken with awe, and wonder, even fear of nature and art as being not about the thing itself, but rather the idea of the thing."
In a system developed over two decades, my process incorporates observation (nature), study (physics) and practice (meditation) into a dynamic creative system of "controlled chaos" that generates pattern formation. I combine properties of topological mixing (pigment and viscosity of media), water, gravity, erosion, wind, and period orbits to recreate natural phenomena with fractal features on gessoed panel. These “strange attractors” are paint waves and disturbances that, through the energy created by the movement of my easel, oscillate along the panel surface creating the characteristics of a pattern created by a body of water, and the nacreous powders create the illusion of emergent structures in nature.
Another influence on my work is light as a refractive and fracturing tool appropriated from the ideas of kintsukuroi – “the piece is more beautiful for having been broken.” With my new pieces, I have combined my methods of painting using the Gravity Easel and casting the flat pieces, and framing them on a transparent acrylic box. With the sculptural cast atmospheric globes, I am furthering my desire to delve more deeply into the various Properties of Light in art. As always I am inspired by the words of Leonard Cohen "There is a crack in everything . That's how the light gets in.”
Suzan Woodruff was born in Phoenix, AZ. From an early age, she began exploring the southwestern desert first on foot then on motorcycle, immersing herself in infinite spaces and spectacular natural vistas that would later become essential to her art. She was raised by her gold-prospector grandparents who taught her how to “read” rocks and by her mother, who lived a distinctly desert-bohemian lifestyle . She remains an avid hiker, biker, surf boarder and reader of rocks as well as books. Woodruff received an art scholarship to attend Arizona State University working as a printmaker, painter, and sculptor. She soon began exhibiting her work and getting recognition internationally and left Arizona for Los Angeles and New York.
Currently, she resides in Los Angeles with her husband writer Bruce Bauman where Woodruff continues her immersion of art and nature of the sublime. Informed with the new and old knowledge of nature, space and science, her goal is to capture even strand of the cosmic web and, as stated by the writer Josh Jones when speaking of the sublime, "to be so absorbed, so stricken with awe, and wonder, even fear of nature and art as being not about the thing itself, but rather the idea of the thing."
