Susannah Phillips: Recent Painting
Lori Bookstein
37 West 57th Street
212-750-0949
By MAUREEN
MULLARKEY
Susannah Phillips
Grey Interior 2002-04
oil on linen, 28-1/4 x 24 inches
Courtesy Lori Bookstein
Susannah Phillips, a former student of William Coldstream and Euan Uglow, lives and works in Montreal. Her first show at Lori Bookstein is a gracious, lively debut. Her work combines the gestural vivacity and painterly ease of accomplished abstraction with a strong affinity for observation. Particularly distinctive is her ability to enkindle the grey scale and convey an impression of color with a limited palette. "Grey Interior" (2004) and "White Still Life" (2004) illustrate how little chroma is needed to infuse an image with coloristic vitality simply by sunning or cooling its values.
Susannah Phillips White Still Life 2004
oil on linen, 12 x 24 inches
Courtesy Lori Bookstein
I particularly like her darkened still lifes, in which different spatial devices are reconciled by an encompassing mood. Ms. Phillips' gifts are abundantly clear. Less evident is where her heart lies: in the swing and movement that the living figure provides pretext for or in the darkling, architectural still lifes. Emotional temperatures are not the same.
