Susan Thornbury

A Little Bit of Magic by Susan Thornbury, Contemporary Still Life

2025

'Somewhere In Between' by Susan Thornbury is a striking abstract work rendered in mixed media on panel. Measuring 36 x 36 in, this piece showcases the artist's distinctive style and ...

"My torn paper shapes are put together like large remains of sculpture being reassembled. My initial thoughts are on pure shape. The unusual shapes coming together in their raw simplistic form, how they interact with each other, the shapes creating their own language. I let them stand alone in their purest form. The way they come together in the space helps ground them, giving a friction of sorts, a system, a world built around the forms, a quiet place within. I love large inviting spaces, as if to say, “Come here, I’m here to comfort you.” I am creating a space where you find a soothing uncluttered balance. I want you to like the stillness there. So every piece of work has a piece of me in it, my personality, my love of spaciousness and calm. I am totally aware of every aspect of the work and in the moment, concentrating on that one moment in time—the Now. It is my desire that the sense of peace, harmony, and stillness is communicated to you." Judith Williams...

This is a one of a kind original painting by southern California artist, Kathleen Kane Murrell. Its dimensions are 52" x 40" x 2". It is acrylic on canvas, glass beads, paper, plaste...

Calvert’s current paintings investigate the relationship between digital media and the reception and perception of images, and utilizes diverse technologies such as fresco, 3D modeling, AI and data manipulation through code. She is especially interested in the evolution of pictorial space. Today we view our screens and the world they occupy as a shallowly layered space of overlapping desktop windows. The picture plane has tilted up again from the flatbed to float in front of our eyes. Calvert’s paintings in turn depict an intermediate space, where the verticality of the still life paintings cohabitate with these digital panes. Dutch floral still life paintings encapsulate multiple concerns. Their subjects were botanical fantasies, emblems of an economic mirage that has contemporary corollaries. Most important to Calvert’s pictorial concerns, they depict ephemeral things in shallow and diagrammatic space - they are all foreground. They contain an abundance of visual information in overwhelming density, creating an allover resolution; a visual field that is equivalent to digital noise. By making painterly interventions into reproductions, Calvert attempts to dissolve the layer between the resolution of the source image and abstraction of the painted mark. ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ Tiffany Calvert has exhibited her work in the US and abroad including Lawrimore Project in Seattle, E.TAY Gallery in New York, the Speed Museum in Louisville and Cadogan Contemporary in London. Residencies include the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, I-Park, and ArtOmi International Arts Center where she received a Geraldine R. Dodge Fellowship. Calvert has received grants from the Great Meadows Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Her work was recently profiled by critic John Yau in the online journal Hyperallergic. Her curatorial projects include “Some Abstraction Occurs” at 65GRAND Gallery in Chicago and “Magic” at Mercer College (featuring work by Chris Martin, Karla Knight...