PAINTINGS : Allegory, Symbolic
"Susan Dorothea White ... explores the most intimate experiences of her life, as well as more topical subjects, in meticulously limned paintings on wood panels. Her ability to examine unflinchingly such personal milestones as her surgery for a benign brain tumour with a dazed self-portrait in a vertiginously askew hospital setting results in some of the most emotionally jarring narrative imagery in recent art."
Gallery & Studio, New York (1998)
The artist has developed a technique using multiple washes of acrylic paint on plywood panels, often accentuating the wood grain to create texture through translucent glazes. Major paintings are developed through preliminary watercolour compositions and from numerous drawings and pen sketches. The artist favours watercolour for spontaneous work, flower and nature studies.
Allegory, Symbolic: Symbolic visual interpretations of metaphors, idioms, sayings, literature, history, music, and natural ethereal phenomena. Post-modern paintings inspired by Leonardo da Vinci, Hieronymus Bosch, Rembrandt. Feminist perspective with an ironic twist. Mixed media sculpture assemblages that combine everyday materials with carved Huon pine - ‘Idioms in mixed mediums’.