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New Work
April 9 - May 15, 2004
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Susan Hartnett’s work is characterized by two distinct,
but related modes of expression: the dynamic charcoal drawings of field,
marsh and dune grasses; and the large-scale, richly colored pastels on painted
paper. The charcoal drawings evoke a range of metaphors and associations
that mirror human experience, references at once private and universal in
the perennial cycle of life, death and renewal.
“Hartnett has a keen discernment for the properties of charcoal –
its weight, density and pliability – and the manner in which she sets
down her line is deftly unadorned.”1 “Allowing charcoal to stutter
and flow, thicken and thin, smudge and smear – she makes it look easy.
Her drawings, made with the precision of a botanist, have the economy of
a haiku.”2
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[In the pastels], recollections of walks in wood and field
and seaside,…movements and counter movements are abetted by the nature
of the materials. Pastel is the most pure of all colored media, so that
color reaches its highest pitch and saturation. A sweep of the arm, with
varying pressure, can bring the truest intonation and even heighten perception.
A color can be read as a linear direction, an accent, a solid object, a
level in the complex spaces of nature. As we sometimes find in Kandinsky’s
paintings, there are various vortices from which strokes energetically suggest
centrifugal movements.3
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Susan Hartnett’s work is informed by both Asian and western
aesthetic traditions – from Zen and Taoist philosophers and painters
to such modern and contemporary artists as Degas, Matisse, Pollock and de
Kooning. “What de Kooning and Ms. Hartnett share is a deep-seated commitment
to the natural world, an inclination to settle imagery within the parameters
of the page, and a love of mark-making as a primal gesture of individuality.”4
Sources of inspiration aside, Hartnett demonstrates a singular and independent
awareness of the power of art to illuminate ordinary phenomena. She successfully
provides for the opposing claims of science and art, rational thought and
mysticism, the lush and the austere, the awkward and the classically balanced,
the literal and the abstract. “Like a diarist, she records the living
universe, "this season, this day, this hour, this wind velocity, this
tidal breeze, this kind of grass, …this kind of snow, this silence,
this sound in the grass, this pitch of the wind."5
Born in St. Louis in 1940, Susan Hartnett grew up near the sea in Massachusetts.
She lives and works in New York City and coastal Maine.
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1 Naves, Mario. “Even Her Smudges Have Humility,”
The New York Observer, November 27, 2000, p. 17.
2 Idem. “Making Her Mark,” The New York Observer,
August 4, 2003, p. 16.
3 Ashton, Dore. “Susan Hartnett,” catalogue essay,
Susan Hartnett: Recent Work. New York: Danese, 2000, p. 7.
4 Naves. “Making Her Mark,” 2003, p. 16.
5 Ashton. “Susan Hartnett,” 2000, p. 5.
New Work, April 5 – May 4, 2002 
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