Susan Manchester

As a young artist studying printmaking in Florence, I spent long hours pouring over the original drawings of Rembrandt, del Sarto, Pontormo, Michelangelo and others in the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe deli Galleria Uffizi. I studied the paintings of Caravaggio and Goya and the paintings and etchings of my teacher, Giorgio Morandi. As a printmaker, I learned to see the world in the black and white and graduated values that are a signature of my drawings. Later, architectural drawing, botanical illustration and graphic design informed the structural aspects of my work.  
The making of a representational drawing requires a decoding of its underlying components, the unity of which masks a realm of abstraction inherent in reality. The use of both wet and dry drawing mediums allows fluidity in both my vision and my process. Whether the subject of inquiry is the figure, botanical imagery or still life, it is a vehicle to articulate qualities of clarity and directness. The placement of the subject on the page illuminates its essence, just as the quality and directionality of light convey the poetics of a single moment. The power of repetition, and of what has been witheld, the balance of detail, and the occasional playful incongruity, becomes a “portrait” of my visual perception.
Informed by the sensibility of artists who preceded me while nevertheless firmly rooted in the present, I regard my drawing as a still point in a fast-forward world, neither backward-looking nor gripped by the contemporary malaise, la fuite en avant, that consumes us. The content is an aggregate of my curiosity and close observation of nature’s drama, the meaning of which is intentionally equivocal. With specific narrative aspects of the work left open to speculation, the viewer may connect through a felt sense of the present and of his or her presence in it.