Susan Jane Walp
American painter
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Susan Jane Walp (born September 7, 1948) is an American artist known for small, contemplative still life paintings.[1][2][3][4] Critics describe her work as meditations on time, memory and mortality,[5] celebrations of the complexities of seeing,[6] and homages to the dignity of natural and humble objects.[7][8][9] Stephen Westfall commented, "the care and precision of her painting decisions are felt as a kind of spiritual penetration into the everyday and into the realm of awareness in art wherein the living speak with the dead or the otherwise absent."[10]
Susan Jane Walp | |
|---|---|
| Born | September 7, 1948 Allentown, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Education | Mount Holyoke College New York Studio School |
| Known for | Still life painting |
| Spouse | Michael Moore (1941-2014) |
| Awards | Guggenheim Fellowship American Academy of Arts and Letters National Endowment for the Arts National Academy of Design |
| Website | Susan Jane Walp |
Early life and education
Walp was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on September 7, 1948.[2][11] She studied art at Mount Holyoke College (BA, 1970) and a Boston University summer program, where she first worked with painter Lennart Anderson, a longtime mentor and friend, who taught her a painting approach grounded in tonal relationships.[2][5] She undertook further studies at the New York Studio School, with Nicholas Carone, the Skowhegan School, and the Brooklyn College MFA program.[5][2]
Career
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]
Work and reception
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]
Recognition
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]