Susan Strande

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

I am a figurative and landscape painter working mainly in acrylic, oil, watercolor and portable buon fresco. My work has evolved alongside my practice. Much of my landscape work is both observed in nature and abstracted from memory. I have also done semi-performative photographic, installation and film work in the past. I began training to draw by analyzing the figure with my mother who studied with regional artists at The Frederick Layton School of the Arts in Milwaukee. As a child, I found photographs my father took with his Leica when he liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp which showed mountains of nude skeletal bodies. Those disturbing images affected the way I interpret the world. After receiving my MFA, I received a scholarship to learn traditional fresco painting. This experience shaped much of my life’s art practice. In New York, I met such artists as David Wojnarowitz, Martin Wong and many influences as a waitress trying to pay rent working at The Nightbirds on Second Avenue. I worked at Jus de Pomme Gallery in the East Village and showed work at Danceteria, Limbo Lounge, at other happenings and at the Rivington School, as has been discussed in the publication “Rivington School 80’s New York Underground.” At The Center Show, a groundbreaking exhibition at the New York Gay Community Services Center in 1988, I created a large fresco in situ. I raised two children in the East Village and taught art in several high schools in the Bronx. My work has been...

Artwork