Susan Goldsmith. Apropos Beauty

About

This will be Goldsmith’s second solo show with Gallery Henoch. The event is free and open to the public.

For Apropos Beauty, Susan Goldsmith pursues lush, romantic paintings, unafraid of unleashing her sumptuous, poetic spirit. In sixteen compositions gilt with gold and hewn smooth with resin, Goldsmith’s ragged branches, persimmon trees, sprays of eastern redbud and other fragments of nature reveal the sensibilities to light of the photographer, the painter and the jeweler.

Goldsmith is particularly drawn to the simple beauty of mutable natural environments, focusing on the cycles of nature, sunlight and shadow, time’s passage and human perception. Much of her subject matter comes from exploration, from hiking the Muir Woods in California to roaming Central Park in New York. Goldsmith has a tendency to observe certain locations for long moments and multiple times to capture just the right interplay of light, shadow and color. In the work we see her inquiry as organic forms are pictured up close and from afar before she cuts them up and puzzles the pieces back together. With these slices of nature she composes multiple paneled art works– diptychs, triptychs, and polyptychs – making a hybrid of her subject. The resulting compositions are like short poems, for this reason Goldsmith’s works tend to unfold their truths over time. In presenting only fragments of nature, the artist focuses our attention on the ephemeral splendor of this planet and allows each tree or blossom to transmit its own lucid energy. In that vision there is a contagious radiance that she hopes to share.

Goldsmith works out of her studio in San Rafael, California, not far from Lucas Digital Arts and Industrial Light & Magic where she honed methodologies used in rotoscoping, the tracing of film, and other animation techniques. By viewing her work from the perspective of cinematography, she began to see light as a medium to utilize in her compositions. Although initially inspired by antique Chinese screens, Goldsmith elaborated her use of leafed panels as backgrounds to reflect light -much like a light box. With the addition of contemporary materials such as resin, pigment prints, acrylic paint, and crystalina (mica infused watercolors), Goldsmith’s meticulous, layered works vibrate with reflected and refracted light. Bouncing through the transparent layers of resin, paints & prints, the light takes every advantage of each color’s optic vibrancy. And thus, her richly hued compositions appear to glow before the viewer.