SUSAN HOMER

My paintings express what I cannot explain in words. Through them, I indulge my love of pattern and material, I create new stories based on old ones, and I imagine what I cannot know. 

I have painted birds, flowers, and trees for more than thirty years. Through the process of painting, I hope to conjure a timeless place where traces of real things and events and my state of mind are revealed. I am interested in the realm between the real and the folkloric, between what I see in front of me and what I imagine. Though my paintings are sometimes blunt in their execution, they are nonetheless romantic in their associations. 

My big flower paintings are like gardens. They evolve over months, sometimes years, and along the way, they develop minds of their own. I compose the elements initially, but at a certain point in the process, things become a little looser, or at least more democratic. As these same elements command an organization more naturally suited to them, I am forced to answer in ways that are often unexpected. By contrast, each of my small flower paintings and still lifes is deliberate. I establish the composition at the outset, and it rarely veers. But, here, like fugitive guests, the birds—if they appear at all—are unplanned. They enter later and perch if they fit.  

I experience my work as a threshold between the past and present. At one level, as I finish a piece, it is a record of my past action. At another, the subjects I depict, the birds, flowers, trees, and patterns, are of personal and emotional significance, or records of a different sort. The dishes and linens that inspire me were my grandmother’s; the flowers are from my garden and the books in my library; and the patterned scrims evoke the wallpaper and fabrics that surround me. My paintings, like an old house, contain many levels of memories. They are a source of constancy, and yet the gentle upheavals make them what they are.

Swallow, Swallow, Flying, Flying, 2019, oil on canvas, 52x40 in.