Artist
About
Susan Marx is in love with color. She approaches painting with the thoughtful spontaneity of an Impressionist. She carefully observes the natural world around her and then freely responds to it with dynamic brushwork.
Marx paints en plein air, deriving inspiration from nature. Her work brings back a School of Paris feeling in its use of pattern, color, shape, and intimacy. Her roots are clear, but her statement is both timely and personal. Each canvas is an intellectual exercise in its use of space and an emotional response to the visual world. She has often been called a "painter's painter".
Her work is greatly influenced by the light of the Mediterranean, which she experienced in Israel where she lived for a while, and in France, where she has traveled many times tracing the footsteps of the Impressionists, Post Impressionists and Fauves to see what they saw with her own eyes. She has been to Paris, Giverny, Auvers-sur-Oise, Arles, St. Remy-de-Provence, Aix-en-Provence, Collioure and Pont Avens. In 2006 she attended a painting seminar in Giverny and other places where Monet painted. In the spring of 2007 she painted in Israel, and that summer she returned to Arles and St. Remy to paint the sites Van Gogh did. In the summer of 2008, she went to the Giverny seminar again; and she painted in Normandy in the spring of 2009. In January 2010 she traveled to the colorful Caribbean with her paints.
Susan Marx received her formal training at Boston University where she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting. She studied with David Aronson, Walter Murch, Robert Gwathmey and Karl Fortess.
Susan Marx is represented by the A. Jain Marunouchi Gallery, 24 West 57th Street, and the Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street in New York City and participates in their exhibitions.
She exhibited her work in the Gaelen Gallery East at the JCC in West Orange, NJ in the fall of 2008 and at The Tenth Muse in Maplewood, NJ in 2009. She has paintings on view at Calima in Montclair, NJ and The Right Angle, Hoboken, NJ.
Susan Marx has exhibited at the Fox Gallery, the Keane Mason Gallery and The Emerging Collector in New York and in New Jersey at the Robin Hutchins Gallery, the Korby Gallery, the Hait Gallery, Nitsa Fine Arts, the Marino Gallery, the Galen Gallery, The Art Gallery of South Orange (now the Pierro Gallery). Her work has been shown at the Salmagundi Club and the National Arts Club in New York City where she won an award, and in alumni show at Boston University Gallery. She exhibited in Paris at the Musée des Duncan. In Israel, she showed her work at the Museum of Printing Art in Safed and at the Artist's House in Jerusalem. Her works are in private collections nationally and internationally.
She currently volunteers at the Newark Museum and the Montclair Art Museum, NJ.
Artist's Statement
My art is a result of my radical amazement at the visual world around me, and my need to capture it by creating a painting. Nature may be my starting point, but it is not my end result.
I observe nature very carefully and respond spontaneously to what I see and feel. I love color, and I love paint. I think of painting as drawing in color, relating warm and cool with each forceful brushstroke. Every painting is a study in design, the placement of shapes on canvas. The plastic elements are of the utmost importance to me.
I paint outside, en plein air, a la prima, to obtain immediacy and do not "correct" my paintings in the studio afterwards. Most of my paintings are small, 16" x 20", a size that sits well on my portable easel. As a result, while my paintings are powerful, they are also intimate. I work in acrylics, which allows me to record color impressions quickly.
Someone once said that my work has aspects of Monet, Van Gogh and Matisse. Nothing could have made me happier to hear. It is important to have teachers, and to then use those teachers to create your own personal visual expression and style to share with the world.