Susannah Phillips: Recent Painting
37 West 57th Street
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.
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.