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"Susan Suriyapa’s minimal black-and-white drawings based on forms from nature, examine the tension between expansive gestures and attention to minute details. They make manifest the dynamic process in which pictorial elements cohere into an aesthetic image only to dissolve again into marks on paper."
"Susan Suriyapa presented large drawings on a toothy transparent plastic paper. Some of her drawings are minimal, sublime and lyrical, drawing on phenomena in nature that are often barely recognizable.
I am fond of the fragile, pastel images in this earlier part of her series. In the last year some of her work has become bolder, more aggressively black and white, with an energy that sometimes borders on frenetic. They seem further abstracted and focus my attention quite exclusively on the lines and marks themselves, subjecting every mark to great scrutiny. I enjoyed the opportunity to discover the form of a storm or mountain vista or delve slowly into the details of every freckle on the petal of a lily that the more representational works afford." "Susan Suriyapa’s ethereal drawings are based on her experience and observations of the natural environment including flowers, seeds and sweeping landscapes. While she draws inspiration from traditional Chinese landscape paintings, her spontaneous and expressive works attempt to describe the moments that are often beyond the ability to be adequately captured."
"Susan Suriyapa's series of paintings are examples of landscape as experience. The most expressive of these is her study of a mountain. This series emerges from her personal encounter as what she refers to as 'essence' of her subject. Suriyapa captures the transient nature of the massive form, in a manner not unlike that of some Chinese landscape painters. In contrast to the single images of such predecessors, however, she explores and reveals the mountains' underlying, experiential form, through a sequence of ever evolving images. She begins with a representation of the mountain's physical form. From there it is dissolved by a cloudy void; finally, any reference to its initial shape is removed. What is left is the 'essence'--a massive yet mass-less undulating entity in space. Through these images she creates an environment that speaks to the experience, not only of that particular mountain, but more broadly of natural forces and our own emotional responses to them."
Heather Kahtleen Peterson, Expanding Landscapes, Lift Off Catalogue 2010
Sublime/Transcendent Featured Artist of the Week on BayAreaArtGrind.com
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