Susan Jane Walp

Walp has exhibited in solo shows at galleries including Fischbach and Tibor de Nagy in New York City, Pamela Salisbury in Hudson, New York,^[12][1][6] Hackett Freedman in San Francisco,^[7] and Victoria Munroe in New York City and Boston.^[13][14] Her work has also appeared at the American Academy, Denver Art Museum, Jaffe-Friede Gallery of Dartmouth College, Naples Museum of Art and National Academy Museum, among other venues.^[5][7] She is based in Vermont.^[2]

Critics link Walp's work to historical traditions such as American pragmatism and its emphasis on discipline, attention and craft, Roman frescoes and Northern European renaissance still lifes.^[1][10][6] Modern touchstones include the compositional order of Cézanne and the early Cubism of Braque and Juan Gris, Giorgio Morandi, and 20th-century American painters such as Charles Webster Hawthorne and Edwin Dickinson, who combined penetrating observation with an atmospheric, sometimes abstract, sense of space.^[9][8][1] New York Times critic Ken Johnson wrote, "Walp is a modernist … She knows how to make paint do double duty in the service of both a cannily abbreviated illusionism and a delicate abstraction of paper-thin planes … how to let painterly gesture embody a sensual urgency that the imagery demurely guards."^[9]

Walp typically works at a limited size in muted colors and in a square format more associated with abstraction.^[5][8][15] Her iconography is enigmatic, consisting of arrangements of objects without functional relationships to one another.^[5][8][16] Her compositions frequently employ a complex geometry of secondary shapes and objects revolving around a central, often circular, element.^[10][5][17] She sometimes compresses space in way that equalizes meticulously detailed objects and minimal, rougher backgrounds, creating a tension between intimate naturalism and artifice (e.g., Melon Sliced Open on a Black Plate with Knife, 2015).^[6][1][7] Art in America critic Eric Sutphin remarked, "The modesty of Walp’s work is deceptive: her paintings demand the viewer’s complete attention in order to reveal their nuances … [they] reward those who take the time to look at them closely and deeply, their quiet stillness offering a moment of contemplative sanctuary."^[1]

Walp was awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (2006), Bogliasco Center (2007), New York Creative Arts Public Service Program (1978) and National Endowment for the Arts (1977).^{[18][19][20][11]} She received awards and grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2009, 2021) and National Academy of Design (2006, 2009).^[20] In 2017, she was the artist-in-residence at Dartmouth College.^[21]

Walp's art is held in the public collections of the Hood Museum of Art, National Academy Museum and Sheldon Museum of Art, among others.^[22][23][24]

• Official website
• Susan Jane Walp & Eleanor Ray in Conversation, New York Studio School, 2021
• Susan Jane Walp interview, Savvy Painter, 2016
• Susan Jane Walp interview, Hyperallergic, 2015
• Susan Jane Walp, Tibor de Nagy