Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
I now have a studio that is open to the public for six months a year, unlike the relatively hidden country place on which I lived twenty years ago, and I have the benefit of meeting for the first time a lot of the people who know and collect my work. Two of the words I hear them apply to my prints astonish me: realistic' and photographic'. I am surprised at this because I think of my work as being very abstract. I perceive a three-dimensional and coloured world and reduce it to black and white patterns on two-dimensional paper. This is something like the reduction of music heard and set down on paper in the form of a score. And viewers of my prints, like musicians who can reconstitute the score into music in their heads, can read my images and imagine something close to the subject I experienced at the start of my creative exercise. The process through which I go as I create an image remains largely mysterious to me, but I do know that it is far from merely registering, as accurately as possible, the material presented to my eye. I change many lines to satisfy my sense of design, I invent textures which will, I hope, suggest the surfaces of the objects before me, and I create systems of light and shadow that will best reveal the fragment of the world I have chosen to depict. What pleases me is that the image I offer the viewers challenges them, like musicians faced with a score, to engage in a creative process of their own, filling out the image with remembered experience. Turning my white dots and dashes into the shimmering, iridescent wings of a dragon fly -- and believing in their own conjuring -- is the necessary corollary to my process of abstraction. That people are so ready to enter into this give-and-give game fills me with wonder and gratitude. It is very reminiscent of the colouring books of childhood, those invitations to fill the spare outlines with our own sense of the plausible or the fantastic. It is sad that colouring books were so often misused to train young minds into a banal obedience to convention. It is a source of joy to see adults looking at my work and beginning to play.'
Synopsis
You have never read a book like Susan Perly's first novel "Love Street." Open it anywhere, and out comes the voice of Miss Mercy, late-night radio DJ in New Orleans with her jive talk and old vinyl platters. Sam Cooke, Percy Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Van Morrison, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, war, art, peacetime a Miss Mercy talks to the lonely. She swings, she bebops, growls, prays, plays blues, soul, jazz, R&B. Miss Mercy is the modern woman of all ages. She is lo-fi, urban, mysterious. She is wacky, she cascades sheets of sound. Remember when you used to listen to a radio under your pillow? "Love Street" is a radio novel from that world. Miss Mercy a the sultry vinyl pirate, the Mistress of the Mike a aims to seduce you. To remind you of the fun of words, to woo you back to the love of reading.
Synopsis
The process through which I go as I create an image remains largely mysterious to me, but I do know that it is far from merely registering, as accurately as possible, the material presented to my eye. I change many lines to satisfy my sense of design, I invent textures which will, I hope, suggest the surfaces of the objects before me, and I create systems of light and shadow that will best reveal the fragment of the world I have chosen to depict. What pleases me is that the image I offer the viewers challenges them, like musicians faced with a score, to engage in a creative process of their own, filling out the image with remembered experience. Turning my white dots and dashes into the shimmering, iridescent wings of a dragon fly -- and believing in their own conjuring -- is the necessary corollary to my process of abstraction. That people are so ready to enter into this give-and-give game fills me with wonder and gratitude.'