Susan Whyne

Moving to the San Francisco Bay Area from New York City gritty apartment houses in 1968 presented me with the new experience of living in singular houses that had yards with "nature" in front to lead you inside. This "nature" was an artificial "construction", a planned or accidental manmade-planted landscape, a miniature taming of the wild, with sidewalks, stairs, and other architecture intermixed, suggesting mysterious, odd stage sets. Blocks of endless front yards with unexpected arrangements of forms, patterns, and color lead to ten years of paintings, mostly small-scale works on paper. The first ones started as black-and-white photos, isolating aspects of the yards that held particular sculptural and metaphoric associations, adding color with markers. Then came fantasy "fragments" composed on a white paper ground, in watercolor. More realistic representations of fragments of an actual site followed, also in watercolor or acrylic. Later paintings in this body of work were photorealistic presentations of the entire front entrance and house, in acrylic.

Paintings range from about 9x12 inches to 29x41 inches, on paper.