Essays & Reviews
In Ross’s work, boundaries fade to reveal an inherent order that does not depend upon constraint. Her paintings are like stained glass windows with the lead cames removed: form and color maintain their integrity, but the lines of demarcation have dissolved. In Ross’s luminous and fluid works, separation between the terrestrial and the celestial, matter and spirit, being and non-being, is disappearing. Assured by the physical elements’ innate capacity to meet with equanimity the infinite nature of being, the viewer is encouraged to step gracefully through distinct apertures into another, deeper dimension of the self. (from Within One Room, Shared Space essay) - Sarah A. Wadelton, Brooklyn-based writer
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Taking into account the paintings of Susan Ross and Monique Ford--sophisticated abstractionists both; one lyrical, the other gritty and both attuned to the medium's allusive capabilities--you might start to wish that more artists divvied up their studios. If there's one thing Shared Space makes clear, it's that while inspiration can come from any number of sources, sometimes the best source is putting brush to canvas not a few steps away.
How consciously Ross and Ford key into the other's art is less important than the commonalities the work itself reveals and how those commonalities are made distinct by the inexorable force of personality. If both painters favor shapes, rhythms and relationships derived from nature--the landscape, say, or the figure--they tackle it in significantly particular manners. Within encrusted surfaces and heaving rhythms, Ford endows untempered emotions with muscle and bone, tension and release. Ross tends toward the quirky and ineffable: tempos flow, colors are rendered luminous, and space is intimate, enigmatic and gently calibrated. (from Shared Space essay) - Mario Naves, art critic and artist
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Ross’ paintings carry a generative fluidity in their clear embrace of form. Without actually being floral per se, Ross is enchanted with nature’s most resilient up-beat colors, but cultivates this appreciation through a more staid interlacing of semi-circles and ellipses. Even Lee Krasner would have had a difficult time disliking the overall effect. Read more at www.artinbrooklyn.com - Matthew Farina, art critic, artist and curator
Though her improvisatory approach recalls that of the Abstract Expressionists, the work’s aesthetic scope of reference encompasses the history of art. In their open-ended complexity and variegated palette, Susan’s compositions touch upon sources as diverse as Byzantine icons, Persian miniatures, Chinese scroll painting and the work of the American modernist painter Arthur Dove.
Susan’s ambition is to infuse abstraction with the sweep and grandeur of nature, of forces outside the control of humankind. Simultaneously, painterly form--color and shape, space, light and touch--is employed as a means for intensive spiritual exploration. Susan knows that a painting is more than mere physical fact; that it can be an encapsulation of, as well as a conduit for, experience. Her aspirations are matched by her determination and talent. In Susan’s best work, a hard-won equilibrium is achieved between the awesome impersonality of nature and the intimacy of individual desire. - Mario Naves, art critic and artist
When in her studio, I am always struck by how work that has a raw, vibrant come-on quickly settles into a smartly driven meditative experience: Susan knows how to pitch visually poetic counterpoints within her work so that the viewing experience is always fresh. - Brice Brown, art critic, artist and founder & editor of The Sienese Shredder
Look at the heat of those colors, at the voluptuous curves. What comes is as surprising as it is illuminating—reverb, echo, eddy, distributed points of convergence, an elaborate calculus. ... Ross’ images, meanwhile, proffer the dizzying dream of life emerging. And yet we learn from these that the very collusion of forms—the spiraling and intertwining, the harmonies and dissonances—is itself the birth of form. Read more in the Luminescence Catalogue - Daniel Coffeen, Ph.D.