ARTIST
Suellen was born in western New York state and moved to New York City in 1963. She has been making art for thirty years, having studied at the Art Students League at both the New York City and Vytlacil campuses, Rockland Center for the Arts in Rockland County, New York, and the Old Church Cultural Center in Demarest, New Jersey. She's currently at the Greenwich Art Society in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Her work is owned by the Art Students League’s permanent collection, where she earned many awards including Best In Shows, purchase prizes and a merit scholarship. Suellen’s work was acquired to travel with the National Sports Museum’s traveling collection for two years. In 2018, Suellen won the Dagny-Hultgreen award for Oil/Acrylic at the Greenwich Art Society’s 100th Anniversary Juried Show at the Bendheim Gallery in Greenwich, Connecticut. The juror, Kelly Baum – the Cynthia and Leon Polsky Curator of Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, called Suellen’s work, “Boom-Boom-Boom”, the work of a risk taker, having the grit, strength, and contemporary beauty in the tradition of the iconic Philip Guston and contemporary abstract expressionist, Amy Sillman.
Suellen holds a Masters in English Literature from New York University, a BA from Hunter College in NYC, and an associate degree in Fashion Communications from the Fashion Institute of Technology, also in NYC.
In Suellen’s series of Abstract Barns and Structures in acrylic, she creates paintings of suggested architectural forms in which she elevates the subject to an importance beyond it's earthly and fixed appearance. Placed above eye level, dripping and deconstructing, the paintings become a statement of the subject’s monumentality and impermanence.
In her series in acrylic & oil called “Life on Mars”, forms that suggest figurative shapes are again elevated above eye level creating a new vision of gravity and a suggestion of “unknowing”. Her works on paper are precursors, and ongoing studies, of her painting themes.