Greenq Maroon Dragon Purple Reversal Lattice Red Dragon1 Lacey Shroud (Broken) Shroud (Fractured) Shroud (Collapsed) A R T I S T S T A T E M E N T Shrouds. A shroud. Many shrouds. Paintings as garments, as veils. Paintings that conceal and in their concealing reveal new ways of looking at the world. I started my newest series of paintings, called “Shrouds,” before the events of September 11. But since that day the paintings appear more and more to me as crumpled facades. Each painting, though it may look digitally derived, was in fact drawn freehand last spring. This autumn the drawings were transformed into paintings, the spaces filled in with bright bursts of color, the textures deepened to incorporate differently hued whites. The white spaces are not so much empty as subdued and reflective. They are the eyes through which you view the storm. They are the silences between the lines. I grew up in the heartland surrounded by geometrically perfect fields of golden corn. Perhaps it makes sense, then, that I started my career after graduating from Pratt Institute in 1969 working with pattern painting. From 1975 to 1981 I showed in New York at the Susan Caldwell Gallery as well as Andre Zarre. But soon my work was evolving out and the patterns were no longer confined to canvas. Chairs were incorporated, and miscellaneous found objects, including toys belonging to my three boys. Doors were attached to the canvases in an attempt to expand painting’s dimensionality. I was doing more installations and what paintings I did were post-abstract landscapes that spot-lit my fascination with nature, specifically swamps and deserts. My work changed again in 1992 when I developed brain cancer. One day I was painting, the next I was in a coma. I didn’t hallucinate. I had no visions. Slowly, and central to the recovery process, I began to paint again. Paint itself—its texture, its depth—replaced the blood I was losing regularly. I returned to the work I’d done shortly before my cancer and painted over it in an attempt, I guess, to erase the past. With an electric sander I swiped down through the layers of the past. Five years after my cancer I showed these paintings at the Cultural Center in Chicago in a show called “Fragile Landscapes.” But by then I had returned to pattern painting. Two years ago, after a trip to southern Spain, fascinated by the Islamic tiles I saw there, I began to see a new side to working in pattern. The art-versus-illusion question I thought I’d exhausted reasserted itself. The principles of camouflage, the painting process, and chance, texture and space were as fresh as when I’d first discovered them. “Shrouds” is the result of this rebirth, this renewal of purpose. Each “Shroud” is a portrait of a self in continual change and a culture in crisis. Early in my career, from 1975 to 1981, I worked in pattern, showing pieces in New York at the Susan Caldwell Gallery as well as Andre Zarre. Soon my work was evolving, the patterns shifting from the canvas to chairs, to found objects, to doors attached to the canvas. The next step in my artistic evolution was installations, painted landscapes. My work was moving ever outward, beyond patterns to the patterns found in nature in deserts, in swamps. Recently, prompted by a trip to Spain, seeing the Islamic tiles, I have returned to pattern painting. Now, in revisiting the work through which I formed my identity as an artist, I have opened things up a bit, including traditional composition. To contrast with the intricate complexities of the canvas' pattern, I have inserted large blocks of color. I now feel the world is static and not static, balanced and unbalanced. The interplay of solid color, hot and cold, and the patterns, snaking around the canvas as a virus plaguing a human body, open up the dimensionality of the work. I believe the recent work to be some of the powerful of my career, some thirty years in the making, perhaps because of a traumatic experience suffered in the early l990s. I had brain cancer. But I have survived. So has the work. Biographical Sketch: I received a B.S. from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and an M.F.A. from Pratt Institute Graduate School of Art & Design in New York. For a number of years I was a Professor at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, where I taught courses on painting and also art history, and I served on the Illinois Arts Council's Visual Arts Panel. In 1973 I was a founding member of Artemesia Gallery, an all women cooperative which still exists today. I have since been represented by the Jan Cicero Gallery, and have been included in shows at the Jean Albano, the Gwenda Jay and the Nancy Lurie Galleries, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, the State of Illinois Gallery, and the Hyde Park and Evanston Art Centers here in Chicago, among others. In New York City I was represented by the Andre Zarre Gallery and the Susan Caldwell Gallery, and was in shows at the Bronx and the Queens Museums. My work has also traveled to St. Louis and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and to China and Germany, and is in many private and public collections. For the past twenty five years, I have lived in Chicago, raised three boys, including a set of twins, and I have always painted full time. Contact info: 773-935-2134 cmichod@cs.com Susan's artwork is available for purchase on the Chicago Artists Coalition Website, to view click through the following link: Susan Michod on the Chicago Artists Coalition Website