Paintings in Series….

If you think you are seeing a lot of the same subject in my paintings popping up lately, it’s because painting ideas need full exploration. Take the poppies, for instance. The poppies began with a diptych (a pair of paintings) of red poppies, and grew from there. More poppies, more color, more sizes of canvas. Like the Atmosphere series, I plan to paint twenty pieces, then shift to a new idea. The different sizes is an usual concept—usually a series is the same size, following one idea to a fully investigated end. Delving into an idea can produce surprising results, as fields of multi-colored celebratory poppies. A series of paintings is an opportunity to walk around an artist’s mind, and see the sights. My artist mind relishes variety: color, size, methods and mediums. Some of the poppies are painted with water based acrylic paint with a combination of brush and palette knife strokes, a few with a mixture of acrylic and heavy-body oil, and many in buttery oil paint with only palette knives. All of the backgrounds of the poppy

paintings are four coats of gold acrylic paint, to lend a beguiling sparkle to the paintings. Once the twentieth painting is produced, look for a new direction, and a new series.

California Memories
© Susan Hazard 2005

Assemblage Art—The Art of Recycling

Assemblage art is a technique of creating artworks, usually three-dimensional, with found objects. Objects found or gleaned from diverse sources that can be combined into new and original uses to create an image to convey a message, create an emotional response, answer a question, or more engagingly, pose a new thought. My sister has accused me more than once of being a dumpster diver, and it’s true. The acquisition of objects, new or old, that pique my imagination and fall into the completion of the puzzle, is a continuing passion. When on the hunt, junk stores, antique marts, second-hand stores, garage sales and unguarded dump sites all produce wonderful opportunities for recycled art. The use of suitcases as a matrix for the visual message began while I was living in Ireland. My life had begun to be unsettled, as the wandering gypsies, living with as few possessions as the body or vehicle could carry. The first suitcase was in Ireland, filled with hand-cut peat and stones, illuminating the heart and past of the Irish emigrant who could not live to return home. The traveling aspects of suitcases continue to inspire and delight my imagination.

Demeter
© Susan Hazard 2005

The Traveling Shrine series, the Reliquary series….all began with the serendipitous find, leading to a thought that created a journey of search and rescue—found and discovered objects– culminating in an assemblage sculpture. Sculpture is not always a process of reduction, as in carving. Sometimes it is the process of addition, and the re-usage of objects that may originally did not relate to one another, or had outlived their practical or popular usage. These sculptures live beyond recycling—they are worlds in themselves. A world of imagery that evokes haunting memories and deeply held beliefs—shrines and reliquaries assembled to note the  relentless and memorable passage of time.

See Susan Hazard assemblage sculptures at www.hazardassemblages.com

Port Townsend Gallery 
Port Townsend, Washington
Telephone (360) 379-8110
www.porttownsendgallery.com

The Courtyard Gallery
280 Quincy Street, Suite C
Port Townsend, Washington 98368
Telephone (360) 379-0304
www.thecourtyardgallery-pt.com

More galleries coming soon….
See www.susanhazard.com for updated listings.
Also see the web site
for gallery listings in Ireland .