Space shots

Painter Susan Swinand is organic

by Leon Nigrosh

FROM THE 90'S: PAINTINGS, CONSTRUCTIONS, AND WORKS ON PAPER BY SUSAN SWINAND
At the Brush Art Gallery, 256 Market Street, Lowell, through November 7.

Anna Maria College's Moll Art Center is currently home to nearly 50 works by the prolific Susan Swinand who continues to grow in her quest for visual poetry.

Swinand begins each painting without a preconceived image, only a section of color or a sweep of paint. From there she builds areas of paint and glaze, often wiping away as much as she adds. This process of developing lines, shapes, and textures continues until they come together and create a tapestry of organic and geometric objects filled with energy.

In her early works, Swinand often relied upon written words for pattern and texture and often to set the mood. Her 1990 painting Endlessly Rocking quotes Walt Whitman along one side of the canvas; the passage serves as underpainting for the layers of thin color. As time passed, the words were overtaken by simple ovals, circles, and triangles that merge with amoeba-like forms, taking us further into a world of fantasy in flux. In the large, 1996 canvas Night Wind, we can almost feel the wind as it launches globes and cones across the landscape. Her 1998 watercolor Wild Things XI is an ordered explosion of shapes, luminous colors, and of patterns, which, though atypical in most artists' works, are well-developed. Polka dots and stripes abound and are continued in the more modeled forms of As the World Turns and the tiny watercolor Blue Eye.

This playfulness can also be found in Swinand's rarely shown constructions, several of which are included in the exhibit. By transforming her two-dimensional shapes into free-standing objects, she shows us how tenuous and tipsy her spatial relationships can be. In the 10-inch-tall Inhabitation, I, four spindly green legs barely support a lightly painted grainy block of wood that is capped by a polka-dotted pyramid leaning dangerously askew. Yet this work, like her paintings, testifies to the stability, both visual and physical, of Swinand's compositional elements. She approaches each work with an open mind and an air of expectancy, and then just keeps doing it until she gets it right.

The exhibit's overriding message is of growth. In her earlier paintings, Swinand concerned herself with compositional placement. But as her work continued to develop, a greater sense of depth took root. There was a defined overlapping of the pictorial elements. In her most recent paintings, although the concern for composition is still central, individual elements are more rounded and more dimensional and, as in Memoirs, are seen suspended in space.

Swinand likens her painting to poetry and music. In essence, her work expresses a feeling about something greater than just paint, the words, or the notes. Artists like Swinand delve into the spirit of things, the mysteries of life, and then seek to share whatever discoveries they experience.

The gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday from 2 to 4 p.m. Call 757-1429.