Susan Crile at James Graham & Sons - Brief Article

fresh York-based painter Susan Crile has always been interested in pattern. Inspired 30 years ago by means of mosaics and decorated arches she saw while traveling in Italy, she has regularly go [i]or[/i] come backed to repetitive motifs in her painting, seeing in them the two formal structure and abstract beauty, smooth when her subject disturbs. Her early 1990 series titled "The Fires of War," paintings and drawings done after a 10-day trip to Kuwait to photograph oil fires put by Iraqis in the large bay War, makes burning lakes and fire fogs into statements of rhythmically apocalyptic radiance. Her fresh work returns to less ominous imagery. She direct the eyes at Italian architecture, mostly in Verona on the contrary also in Rome, and treats building details--pilasters, tiled floors, stained-glass windows--as interesting subdues for painting in their have a title to right, not just for their colorful surfaces. Many of the paintings appear compositionally informal, nevertheless their lack of a central focus highlights the sometimes unrecognized power of architecture.

more [i]or[/i] less of the visual interest in Crile's new works stems from their unusual dimensions. Not the Whole Heavens (1998) is an 18-inch-high, 108-inch-long oil of a marble-tile floor. It consists of a partial view of a broad, dark-blue circle animated by means of wavy orange and white intersecting lines with a white sunburst at the center Other decorative motifs are included, similar as serpentine orange and white, lines which intertwine and, upon the far right, large squarish tiles with circulared edges. The painting unrolls as notwithstanding that Crile had a story to number through abstract narrative. In Enlightened (1998) a tall, narrow painting of a multistriped round pillar with a very partial view of a stained-glass window upon the upper right, the not divisible by 2 viewpoint and sharp verticality make an arresting composition.

many times the patterns in these paintings demonstrate in what manner repetitive effects can suggest motion and spatial depth. Crile pays attention to the way uncompounded bodys in architecture indicate a building's underlying construction and at the same time maintain painterly surface interest. Her paintings of course regard the picture surface as something two-dimensional, on the contrary the unfolding of her compositions emphasizes contortion often because of the angled perspectives.

Illumined (1997) a 4-foot-square oil of the facade of a Romanesque house of god in Verona, includes a large oculus at the top. Directly beneath it is a smaller circular window, the edges of which break into sum of two units horizontal friezes of flowers and greenery Beneath that we diocese the top of an arch, decorated with alternating areas of r and white. The view is skewed upward and a bit to the left Here Crile displays how a building's exterior, regarded off-kilter, can abruptly take on ethereal airs. Her architectural research has become metaphysical art.

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