Amy Sudarsky
Naked
I've been an admirer of Boston painter Amy Sudarsky's work for years and I've always been fascinated with how she manages to take a mode of figuration that in lesser hands would be academic and craft images with the immediacy of radical concrete painting. She understands painting's ability to reveal depth through unequivocal surface. Although the discipline of rendering from the live model may be as old as painting itself, Sudarsky starts from a set of concerns specific to our moment and recasts our familiar notions of the nude in altogether contemporary terms. She does this without reliance on any narrative device or prop we can date; without the exaggerated foreshortening or cropping of the camera, and without overt expressionistic handling of the paint. Still, Sudarsky's contemporary nudes stem from a long tradition. She has cited influences on her work as diverse as Lucien Freud and Lucas Cranach, and confesses for example to having painted the portrait of Dan in his semi-circular, low-backed chair as a kind of companion piece to Ingres' portrait of dour, elegantly dressed Monsieur Bertin.
Sudarsky achieves her balance of the concrete and the figurative through a seamless melding of uncompromising brushwork and raw psychology. Writing about paint comes more naturally to me than writing about psychology, so to get a fresh perspective on the inner life of Sudarsky's painted persons, I sat in the back room of the gallery one evening pulling out canvases from the stacks with the writer Bradburn Young, a keen observer of human quirks. He said that these are either real people in real situations or else fictional characters who have been studied so solicitously that they have come to life. He described them as glowing back at the light that fell on them. Bradburn pointed out the slumping shoulders and spooked eyes and asked the question as we settled in to consider the canvases as individuals, "What do we see in these haunted bellies?"
Bradburn saw a tension of frailty and resilience in the sitters. He described Dan as looking like he has just realized that he is fate's plaything, readying himself for what comes next. He saw Mia as a flame, with eyes like smudged crystals, an Annunciation happening on her sternum. He took note of Paul's worn face, archaic hair, and eyes that looked like they needed shadows, of Michael's hunching against the cold, and Noel's Eastern European eyelids, swollen from tears. When I asked him about the hands, which often seem to be the focal point of the painting, he said simply, "After death, the last place the soul leaves is the hands." Sudarsky herself has written, "Hands can expound on or contradict a person's facial expression. Hands possess a psychological valence equivalent to the head."
Sudarsky's process comes from a series of layered experiences. She begins a painting or a drawing from live models. This is her first translation, her first impression. She searches for certain aspects of the model that interest her, a kind of selective form of seeing, and in the process she puts a great deal of consideration into her lighting. Light and shadow help her to translate form and psychology successfully. She paints initially with transparant glazes using only two or three colors, as the translucent layers keep the painting lighter and luminous and open to new discoveries. Later on, the paint is applied a bit thicker in some parts, particularly in forms that come forward in space. But fundamentally, even through her series of revisions, the paint handling remains very straight forward, very exposed.
It is this deliberate revealing of the painting process that is critical to the integration of Sudarsky's imagery. I see the expressions of the sitters not so much tormented as open, and serving to underscore a kind of ethic of exposure that Sudarsky maintains, an acceptance that there is nowhere to hide. We are confronted with the paint, just as we are with men and women whose physical and emotional idiosyncrasies are laid bare as they look back at us. We are immersed in an intimate psychology, but through a medium that filters and stages so particularly, that we are left with an experience we could have only through painting. The result is a figuration not so much of the nude as the naked, wherein vulnerability is painted as a strength and mortality as a virtue.
George Lawson, Director
room for painting room for paper