One of the great joys of painting are those magical moments when time seems to both stop and expand.

A day of painting can go by in the blink of an eye, but then when you stop to look, you have done some painting. It is a recording of a day, an entry in a diary.

I am currently engaged in what I call The Domestic Project, part of which is a digital diary of what I seein my backyard, but which also reaches back to a series of non-objective paintings originally derived from my physical home and surroundings. This exhibition is part of a diary of my life, a record of what I see. While my approach changes over time, there are definite through-lines: Trees. Views out of windows. Color and light. Photographs. As I have aged - and with the increased isolation we have all endured during the past few years - how and what I think about and look at have come to reflect my changing interests and capabilities. A number of the oil paintings in this exhibit are part of my Seven Line series, a composition derived from observation of the light coming through Venetian blinds and wooden shutters in my son’s bedroom window. These and some of the stand alone compositions were developed in pencil on graph paper and gouaches color studies. While the unavoidable references in the compositions are both formalistic (the grid) and symbolic of figure on ground - a tree, say, or a landscape/horizon line - the interactions of color and nuances at the edges between colors are simply records of what happens in the studio, on the surface of each painting as it is being made. Limiting my process to such tight parameters affords me a paradoxical freedom of expression. More recently, the accessibility and limitations of my smartphone camera have led me to embark on a new attempt to record the places that surround me in a way that will resonate with others. My focus is shifting towards how to represent discrete, unique moments in time by generating digital generations of images. I am also interested in the generations of viewing that occur in social media, where sharing what we are looking at has become immediate, and looking is pretty much cost-free. I want to make images that record tiers of information that will become invitations to viewers to visit me on the various social media platforms I use.

Before the Seven Line series, I used to make paintings from photographs of the majestic canopies of the street trees that were struggling to grow in the narrow strip of grass between the sidewalk and the road. Now the photographs are becoming the work, both as color and light studies and as a sort of time-stamped diary. Often what I am trying to capture is a momentary quality of light or the effect of the light on the colors in my backyard, or the contrast between the indoor and outdoor light. The Truro photos are about the beauty I find in my sandy, slope-y garden and the variety of volunteer weeds and plants that are repopulating the disturbed areas of my hillside and gravel driveway. I garden by a combination of selective weeding, transplanting volunteers, and introduction of exotic plants. As with painting, I allow for serendipity and I prize nuance, like when you pick up a rock on the beach, and then another, because each one is so beautiful. I hope everyone has those moments when they stop and look around and find the beauty in wherever they are.

Sue Post was born and raised in New York City. Post has exhibited at The Painting Center, The Women’s Museum in Dallas, and OK Harris Gallery. She has received recognition for her work from a number of institutions and publications, including PAAM, Attleboro Arts Museum, the Cambridge Art Association, Studio Visit Magazine and Carnegie Hall Playbill.

Sue Post has an undergraduate degree in painting and cultural anthropology from Princeton University, and an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design’s residential program in conjunction with the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

In 2021 Post moved her studio of the past 20 years in Waltham, MA to her home in Truro.