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Susan Santiago

SUSAN SANTIAGO

About Me

S usan S antiago was born and raised on the East coast where she spent her summer vacations wandering the sandy beaches of the New Jersey shore. After graduating from High school she moved to Greenwich Village, New York and, in 1971, received a Bachelor's Degree in Art History from New York University. A year later she moved to Woodstock, New York in order to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. While living in Woodstock she taught school in Ulster County and attended the Art Students League, where she studied drawing and painting for a number of years. In 1978 she left New York and moved to Venice , California where she enrolled in California State University Los Angeles. She received a MA in Fine Arts in 1982. Upon graduation she devoted herself to painting full time in studios in Venice and later downtown Los Angeles, where she was able to procure a large studio at a minmal expense. At that time she and a photographer were the sole occupants of a building on Vignes street. After a year she decided to forgo city living and move to Topanga Canyon, where she later met her husband Ral, an architect and night club owner . She lived there for 16 years, where she continued to paint and enjoy the rural scenery. During their summer vacations, she and her husband traveled extensively in Mexico; this experience inspired the subject matter of her paintings for a number of years. She later returned to teaching full time, and is currently on the staff of the art department at Palisades High School.

She now resides in Box Canyon, a rustic and remote area near the Chatsworth reservoir. Her home is surrounded by a unique rocky terrain which appears quite often in her most recent landscapes. She and her husband also spend summers in their vacation home in Lake Arrowhead where she also maintains a studio. Susan has exhibited in galleries on both the East and West coasts and has been represented by Orlando Gallery for over 20 years.
Susan has recently begun writing with singer/songwriter Rebecca Dru on a 12 song CD that’s due out in 2008. Her lyrics are filled with stories about life and love, filled with imagery and emotion that will touch the human heart on every level.

My Interests

Susan Santiago
SUSAN SANTIAGO

May 5 - 26, 2007 at Orlando Gallery , Valley

by Ray Zone of artscenecal.com


With a series of small oil paintings depicting California landscapes, Susan Santiago has integrated a pleasant combination of brightly chromatic brushwork with a subtly reductivist impulse to flat color and geometric design. The simply titled paintings offer tactile delight in their organization of color and volume, using landscapes--natural and man-made--as their starting point. Once you get past the quietly poised renditions of nature, there is the intriguing discovery of an old modernist tactic linking the structure of things in nature to the structure of paint: bold brushstrokes working in a gestalt of graduated color. Santiago’s work invokes landscape even as it celebrates the act of painting itself.

“Dark Tree” is a good example of Santiago’s deceptive simplicity. The leafless branches of a black tree spread to all four sides of the painting. Through the interstices of the sinewy branches, graduated color leads the eye into the distance with a modulation of light purple to luminous orange. The sky, perceived through the topmost winding branches, modulates from light blue to cobalt. It is a small shock to see flat, uninflected brushstrokes carry the progression of color and depth in simple blocks. As with many Impressionist or Plein Air paintings, a simple squint of the eyes while looking at the brushwork renders significant changes in perception.

A similar painterly juxtaposition in “Trees No. 2” places black holding lines around the greenery, enclosing expectant colors as with a cartoon outline. These colors, held within a flowing line, stand out against a freely rendered river of luminous brushstrokes that flow by. This is mirrored by a sky that is equally free in its use of a broad brush. “Trees No. 3” places smoothly rendered foreground imagery against a background that is nothing if not Impressionist in its colorful units built from flat, wide brushstrokes.

With “Landscape No. 2” the work moves towards more radical juxtaposition, as wavy mountains built from flat color rest beneath a pointillist sky and sun. A subtly colored field of grass, lightly slashed with vertical strokes of varied greens, sets off and grounds the entire work so that it is organized in three distinct horizontal units. The work approaches a more purely stated sense of design.

“Highway” is built on its clear delineation of a two-lane highway filled with cars streaming in opposite directions beneath jagged vertical sides of a steeply rising mountain. The tertiary colors are from the same chromatic family: subtle greys, purples and their complements of beige and light orange. It’s a palette that whispers, while juxtaposed to a boldness of design.