www.bethsutherlandpaintings.com
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Statement
Multi-block color reduction woodcuts have become the major part of my practice. I depict urban and suburban places that evoke my curiosity while also looking for a rhythm in shapes, light and color. I use the inherent properties of woodcut – woodgrain and created textures with both transparent and opaque inks – to create precise, light filled, mostly architectural images. A large part of my process is contemplating the former landscapes and imagining the progression to what’s in front of me today. The urban landscapes I depict conjure a no-longer-extant landscape with buildings that are shaped both by the land they are sitting on and the way that a real estate parcel had been divided into smaller and smaller irregularly shaped bits. Sometimes there is not a speck of greenery left and sometimes nature seems to want to reclaim its former domain. The transformation continues as buildings are added to, painted, abandoned or demolished. Sometimes the transformation is a sudden change in weather that illuminates something mundane I hadn’t noticed before. Working from life allows me to notice these surprising changes and see architecture not as something static, but as something surprisingly alive and affected by both natural and human forces.
Bio
Beth Sutherland is a painter and printmaker who lives in Dobbs Ferry, NY. She has received several prestigious grants, including New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Printmaking (2023) and Painting (1998-1999), a Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Space Program Fellowship in 2007-2008,and a SECCA Seven Fellowship in 1989. She has also been awarded a SIP Fellowship at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York City (2011), and a Star Fellowship at Guttenberg Arts in Guttenberg, NJ (2014). Her artist’s book, Umpteen Dumpsters, with nineteen woodcuts, was published by theorem eleven in 2013; her work has been featured in the art magazine Carrier Pigeon (2017), andis included in Phil Sanders’ Prints and Their Makers (2021). Sutherland’s most recent solo show was at the Gallery Halmetoja in Helsinki, Finland. In and around New York, her work has been shown at the International Print Center (IPCNY), Marymount Manhattan College, Salena Gallery at Long Island University, Edward Hopper House Art Center in Nyack, and the Gallery on Hudson in Hastings-on-Hudson. In North Carolina, where she lived in the 1980s, Sutherland had a one-person show at Wake Forest University (2011), and also at the Hanes Gallery at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her work appeared in group shows at SECCA in Winston-Salem, The Green Hill Center in Greensboro, the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, among many other venues. She is currently a member of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in NYC, and has taught part-time at Westchester Community College in Westchester County, NY, Purchase College, SUNY, Marymount College in Tarrytown, NY, and at Wake Forest. She received her B.F.A. in Painting from Boston University in 1979, and her M.F.A. in Painting from Tyler School of Art of Temple University in 1981.
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