Susan Puelz (b. 1942)
Susan Puelz was born in 1942
and received her BFA and MFA from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
In 1987 she became visiting assistant professor of art history and watercolor
at UNL and remains in Lincoln to this day. Puelz is known for the vibrant
coloration she creates in her watercolor layered pastels. She describes
herself
as a landscape painter with German Expressionist tendencies and said this
about her work, "Painting the landscape as it is does not ever enter
my mind. I really try to have an ambiguous quality in my work. Is it abstract
or is it a realistic representation?" Puelz leaves that question open
for the viewer to answer.
Artist Statement
My wish is that you could see my work in person. Slides, even photographed
professionally, do not capture the effects of layered pastel and watercolor
that are important
to the totality of my paintings.
Upon first glance, I want to see a painting that is based upon landforms,
skys, rivers, and other recognizable outdoor images and yet has a sense of
place. Looking
closer I want you to see the many small abstractions that are created by
the mixing of pastel and paint. I want you to see how the margins of a body
of water
appear to shift depening on how the pastel line disappears into the watercolor.
Throughout my work ambiguity prevails. A stand of trees in the background
may be painted bright red and yet receed. A lavender-pink curve in the foreground
might appear to be a road when in fact it is a small stream. The subject
may
seem to be found in the midwest when in reality it is dervied from photos
taken in Arizona.
I like to create a tentative equilibrium between nature and man by using
some allusion to human activity. At times referelevator in the foreground,
and at
other times human presence is alluded to in the faint jog of a line at the
horizon that creates a city's skyline.
While landscape is the subject of my paintings, color is the focus. On a
recent road trip to Colorado the sun was at my back. It was late September,
the winter
wheat was just coming up and the milo was that beautiful color between carmine
and aubergine. The background of the sky was a soft robing-egg blue and the
clouds lavender and gray with melon colored edges. The colors in this morning
scene
took my work I use combinations of colors that both exaggerate and document
nature.
My paintings are also about pushing the limits of watercolor and its interaction
with the paper and with pastel. I have painted in most mediums and find
watercolor the most difficult to master. In every painting there are new
suprises. The
subtle colors created by the multiple layers of paint, the bright stroke
of pastel over
equally bright layers of watercolor, or the melting of a pastel line into
a layered watercolor stroke are always changing the direction of the painting.
Flannery O'Connor wrote to a struggling writer: " Wouldn't it be better
for you to discover a meaning in what you write than to impose one? Nothing
you write will lack meaning because the meaning is in you." I feel
this way every day that I paint. I often see the sense of a particular
painting
after
it is completed. Such is the reality of an artist like me who works more
intuitively than itellectually.
