Susan Wanklyn

Susan Wanklyn was born in Montreal (CA), she lives and works in New York (US)

To gaze upon Susan Wanklyn’s unassumingly radiant paintings - simple yet shifty interweavings of richly hued translucent bands - is to surrender to a fine visual hedonism. Ms. Wanklyn creates her luminous plaid compositions using wide brushes and homemade milk-based casein paint. On medium-size gessoed panels, she makes each watery stripe in one or two passes, progressing from, say, a set of lime green alternating with poppy red horizontals to a series of pale blue verticals.
The process seems effortless and even dumb, but you know that considerable preparatory work must be involved for such transparent means to achieve such complex orchestrations of light, color and space. The paintings don’t stay still: blocks of pure color pop up, contrary to the actual sequence of the layering, and different sets of bands recede or come forward as you look.
The effect is mesmerizing. One moment you feel as if you are looking at a piece of a tablecloth; the next, into veiled, Rothkoesque space. Up close, the surfaces have a brushy, delicate but not too fussy semigloss finish - a matter-of-fact materialism giving sensuous body to the vibrant opticality.

Text by Ken Johnson, New York Times, July 9, 1999