Susan Washington is a contemporary abstract painter originally from Brooklyn, New York. Introduced to painting at an early age through a family of artists, she studied Sumi-E, watercolor, and collage as a child before eventually pursuing a creative career of her own.
Before becoming a full-time painter, Washington spent two decades working in the New York fashion industry. She later relocated to the Pocono Mountains to focus on painting and has since developed a distinctive body of work rooted in layered surfaces, urban memory, and narrative mark-making. Her work has been exhibited nationally at the Hamptons Fine Art Fair, Affordable Art Fair New York, The Other Art Fair Los Angeles, and Artspace Warehouse in Los Angeles, and internationally in Antwerp and Southport. Her paintings are included in the collections of Google NYC, Jimmy O. Yang, David Hoey & Katja Van Herle (Los Angeles & Antwerp), The Renaissance Palm Springs, Turnberry Ocean Club, HBO writer Joshua Conkel, The Stastny Foundation, and numerous private collections worldwide.
Washington’s work has also appeared in film and television productions including Book Club starring Diane Keaton, LA’s Finest, The Morning Show, and The Laundromat. She is represented in Los Angeles by Artspace Warehouse.
Washington now lives and works in Baltimore, where she maintains a large studio. In addition to continuing her Subway Sonnets body of work, she creates large-scale commissions and collaborates with designers on residential and hospitality projects. Her recent series expand the narrative dimension of her practice, including Project Visage, a body of work celebrating female strength and identity, and Content Not Found, a politically resonant series preserving images and stories of women whose histories have been erased from public record.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I never considered myself a storyteller, until I did.
My paintings are visual narratives drawn from experiences of love, place, emotion, and the memories of growing up in New York in the 1980s.
The surfaces in my work are derived from memories of graffitied subway cars, public telephone booths, and the rolling steel gates that secure neighborhood storefronts after closing. The mark-making echoes the way these metallic surfaces become layered with the graphic history of the neighborhoods and the people who lived there.
“The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls.”
— The Sound of Silence, 1964
In this environment, a Sharpie marker, pasted handbill, sticker, or aerosol can could transform an entire neighborhood overnight. Punk band posters, political messages, advertisements, and acts of self-expression accumulated in dense visual layers.
My paintings feel as though they were created through a similar process of spontaneous collaboration. The surface becomes archaeological and stratified, layered with graphic artifacts. Some elements are torn away, others are overlaid on existing imagery. The picture plane is scratched, eroded, and scrawled upon. Song lyrics and Shakespearean quotes occupy the same space as philosophy and street slang. There is a rough poetry in the un-painterly rhythm and rawness of this approach.
Within these layers I weave imagery and text that imbue each painting with a specific mantra — from fame and success to love and prosperity. The work pays homage to postwar American art and the Neo-Expressionists.
Icons drawn from world religions and philosophies, images torn from art and fashion magazines, and lyrics from favorite bands all find their way onto the canvas. Each painting is created on canvas using oil paint, spray paint, and paper. Photo Credit: @stuckphoto