Susan Preston
Susan Preston
Susan Preston’s paintings could be described as poetic abstraction or visual reveries.
The artist takes discarded artefacts and fragments, often cultural oddments recovered from beaches, paths and city streets and from this debris make drawings. It is often the least prepossessing — a piece of weed left by the tide, a bent nail in a worn piece of wood — which resonates and becomes the starting point for a painting.
Oil paint is mobile and versatile; the imagery changes through the painting process, dissolving and reforming as a layered, ambiguous space develops. Through this meditative process, the work alludes to memory traces, to the shifting spaces between presence and absence, loss and retrieval.
A piece is eventually resolved when the tension between the layers and the elements on the surface draw the viewer into the space, where the painting reveals its secrets slowly; these works repay contemplation.
Susan Preston has exhibited widely, including in Strasbourg and London. Her work is in collections in Europe, Asia and the USA.
For further information and images please go to www.susanpreston.com
Farm Structure I, oil on canvas, 107 x 122cm, Sue Preston
