Sue Perry - Paintings

An expert spinner of Tales, the painter’s brother has been known to step over a few fictional lines.  Eyes are rolled; coughs stifled.  “Well,” he’ll say, “at least part of it’s true anyway.”  His sister here on Seattle’s 16th Ave. has certainly stretched a few verities in this painting with its hyperbolic Hydra of a backhoe and its transport of the iconic Jimi Hendrix statue from Broadway to her own Seattle street.  She hopes this performance will not affect her standing in the Webmaster’s list of “realist painters!”

This canvas lingered about the studio unfinished for eight years.  Evidence for its outdated reality can be seen in the brick house (memorialized earlier in “Red Couch,” 2013) on the NW corner of East Marion Street and 14th Ave. now a fictional dwelling.   A second clue, a date (April 2011) scribbled on the back of the photographic model for the innocent consumer of the “fruit of that forbidden tree,” supports this history.  Meanwhile, the painter noticed only yesterday that the house on the southwest corner of that intersection is now boarded up, apparently awaiting its “development.”

This painting “appeared” to the painter a year ago as she walked along Seattle’s Marion Street in the direction of 18th Ave., where the Immaculate Conception Church stood behind a screen created by the branches of an embracing cherry tree.  The image brought to mind Camille Pissarro’s painting Les Toits Rouges, which can be seen in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris.  It is a painting made near Pontoise, France; a group of houses with brightly tiled roofs behind what the d’Orsay curator calls “densely intrusive vegetation.” Your local painter wanted to see if she could bring home some of the liveliness of Pissarro’s work. At the same time, she found herself intrigued by the Cezanne-like geometry of the neighborhood scene with its intricate web of diagonals and verticals.

October 2018:  Nothing stands now on the empty space at 14th Ave and Spring Street in the Central District.  One hundred and nine years prior to February 2017, that corner was occupied by the impressive brick, steepled building which became the Progressive Missionary Baptist Church after the United Presbyterians left in 1952.  These changes reflect the many demographic shifts which have characterized the CD from its beginnings (Jewish) to Asian (until World War II uprooted its Japanese population) to its isolated condition (African American), the result of red-lined areas south of Madison Street as well as the intrusion of Interstate 5, to its present gentrifying condition in what has become a hot real estate market for Microsoft and Amazon employees (until what next? in the shifting sands of late stage capitalism . . .).  "Demolition Man” documents a chapter in this evolution.  Soon the inevitable high-priced condominiums will rise.

Purple Couch, oil on canvas, 32 x 38 inches, copyright ©2013

The two months in Paris this year yielded six new Seattle paintings now in process and still in the studio. This strange spread of paint over the globe began last year, 2012. The results of that initial effort can be seen at the Sisko Gallery beginning January 2, 2014, where John Sisko, its proprietor, is hanging an exhibit titled “Seattle: Changing Times.” It focuses on my work dated 1998 and 2012/13 and is therefore a backward look with a gap omitting the Paris years.