Susanne K Arnold

Susanne K Arnold
Richmond, Virginia, USA

STATEMENT

Throughout my 50-year career as a painter, sculptor and printmaker, I have explored encaustic as a means to push the boundaries of my creative ideas, medium and process. My current body of work, “Backyard Tapestries”, is focused on creating encaustic assemblages enriched with fragments of old drawings and monotypes, found objects, and organic material from my garden and neighborhood. I rely on these available materials to create work that visually explores both my own past and present history (children, pets, home, jobs, travels) and my concerns for a future dominated by disastrous climate changes and worldwide health and political crises. My encaustic medium continues to challenge me as an artist and to offer insights as I weave translucent colors and images into tapestries of meaning.

“… life is a tapestry we weave day by day with threads of different colors, some heavy and dark, others thin and bright, all the threads having their uses.” —Isabel Allende

BIO

A painter and sculptor, Susanne K. Arnold exhibits her work regionally and nationally. She holds an MA in Museum Studies and an MFA in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University. Honors include two Virginia Museum Fellowships and national artist grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundations. Solo exhibitions include the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Portsmouth Museum, 1708 and Artspace Gallery, and a retrospective at McLean Project for the Arts in McLean, Virginia. Her talk on “Ephemeral Figures in Wax,” was presented at the 6th and the 7th International Encaustic Conferences in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and printed in ProWax Journal. A member of Artspace, an artist-run gallery, she lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Arnold’s work explores the overlay of cultural memory and personal experience, utilizing a vocabulary of images and the ancient painting technique of encaustic. Arnold has been exploring the encaustic medium
since 1964 and has taught it since 1981. She has presented workshops throughout Virginia as an Artist-in-Education for the Virginia Commission for the Arts and has taught state-wide on a contractual basis.

ARTIST CONTACT

(804) 513-6996
EMAIL | WEBSITE

IMAGES