Suzi Evalenko
Medium: Painting Studio Location: Artist Studios at 43-01 22nd Street - Studio# 400 43-01 22nd Street Email: sevalenko1@gmail.com Website:: www.firststreetgallery.org/artists/suzi-evalenko/ Artist Bio: I am a native New Yorker. I studied drawing, painting and sculpture at the Art Students League, NYC. I show at First Street Gallery in Chelsea, where I have had nine solo exhibitions.. My work has been included in many juried group shows and is in many private collections in the U.S., Europe and South America. My primary media are oil, mixed media, charcoal and pencil. Artist Statement: What I see is what inspires me. But that is just a starting point. Compositions often meld reality and abstraction. I am most widely known as a figurative, still life, and portrait painter, for decades working in thematic series. For the past four years, I have been on an exploration making collages - approaching image-making in a thoroughly unfamiliar way, driven by instinctual choices, without a roadmap. Cut from previously made oil and acrylic paintings on paper or canvas, the pieces interact with each other, and with newly painted imagery, creating often more abstract - and wholly different - compositions. This exploration has permitted me to build and rebuild, again and again, entire compositions 'on the fly', dictated by the addition or subtraction of pieces of color, shape, texture or movement. While this is the first time I have used previous works as the physical source material, it is not the first time I have deconstructed - and re-invented - previously painted imagery in another medium. Several years ago, I made large abstracted charcoal drawings, whose inspiration was just-finished portrait oils, which were shown together in an exhibition entitled Dynamic Synergies. In this Spring's LIC Open Studios, recent collages and a number of the charcoal drawings will be on the walls. All images and text copyright Suzi Evalenko