ABOUT
Growing up in upstate New York prepared me well for my artistic endeavors, as I was constantly surrounded and intrigued by the beauty of natural world. My parents and grandparents contributed to this legacy of creativity by painting, designing buildings, and crafting beautiful clothing for my siblings and me. Their artistry instilled in me a deep drive to create. As a child, I played in the backyard, assembling inedible “visual salads” of bark, leaves, flowers, grasses, and found objects - a playful expression that later opened the door to my evolving collection of non-objective and organic paintings.
I paint because I love to paint. But more than that, I paint for the thrill of discovery-of seeing what happens when dark values meet light ones, when warm tones collide with cool ones, and when complimentary colors vibrate against each other. When I first started painting, I found as much joy in my mistakes as in my successes; those “happy accidents” taught me what the paint could do. Now as I create my abstractions, I relish the process of layering glazes to push and pull forms within the canvas, creating a sense of depth and movement so that the surface seems to breathe and pulse. I enjoy rearranging shapes in my collages until they feel right, transforming those arrangements into drawings, and then into paintings. I never know where the colors will take me - or the viewer. That sense of mystery excites me, as my paintings invite the viewer to imagine their own story, separate from mine.
I can never stop painting. The excitement of the process always leads me to the next canvas and the next. I love playing with gravity in my color fields, letting floating forms create tension and provoke thought. It’s unsettling yet deeply satisfying. Each painting presents a problem to solve, and in solving it, I glimpse a new, balanced world view. In these unsettled times, painting is both my comfort and my challenge – a space where I can play, discover, and create meaning, again and again.
- - -
Suellen Frick Lash has been recognized with scholarships, purchase prizes, and “Best in Show” awards since the very beginning of her career in 1996, when she won back to back “Best In Show” and purchase prize awards at the Art Students League in New York City and her paintings were added to the League’s prestigious “Permanent Collection” which includes paintings from about every notable American artist from the last 100 years. Her full scholarship to study was granted by the Art Students League in 2004. Since then, she has been recognized as note- worthy by being included in prestigious shows by jurors from the top museums in the country: the Guggenheim, Whitney, MOMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Cole Museum, and New Britian Museum of American Art, to name a few. Her working life as a writer in the fashion and beauty industries paved the way for her sophisticated color sense and proclivity for putting seemingly unrelated objects and colors in “curiouser and curiouser” combinations that delight and intrigue the viewer. She wrote for Vogue and Glamour magazines as Senior Writer and for Elle, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar and Brides Magazine, and created color stories for Estee Lauder and Avon.