Reviews:

Art New England Aug/Sept 2004:

Susan Wahlrab : At The Water’s Edge

Susan Wahlrab’s densely patterned watercolors take us deep into a forest glen with dappled light and whispering trees. The shared color and surface of the paintings give the exhibition the encompassing feeling of an environmental installation.

Wahlrab uses layers of opaque watercolor, balancing color harmonies and values to create a surface that glows and pulsates. She chooses blue, purple and green as her cooler color range and yellow, orange, and red as the hotter. Almost all of her pigments are full chromatics; they are not mixed, lightened, or grayed. As with pastels, each stroke is a single color. Her calligraphic marks range from rapid flicks to meandering lines that entwine in a busy rhythm. All the marks convey a sense of Wahlrab’s natural curiosity of and pleasure for mark making. The recurring shapes tend to flatten, and Wahlrab enhances the simple vertical tree forms with arrangements of color suggestive of reflective sunlight.

Several paintings, such as Road Home Spring, Early Walk, and Falling Down the Trail, feature a path or dirt road winding through a dense forest of pine trees. Light crisscrosses the road or puddles in the shadows. Half- seen roots and boulders are upholstered by centuries of fallen pine needles. Other paintings, such as Rooted, could be a view from the trail edge looking through the dense woods toward some hazy, fragmented distance. These titles suggest that the images are documentary records of the artist’s daily experience. The way they recall a particular time of day, season, or weather condition seems a Thoreau-like appreciation of unspoiled nature. And yet titles of two similar works, Where Fairies Live and Fairy Houses, go beyond the obvious natural beauty to share her imagination’s romantic musings.

Dustanight

1997 December/January Art New England Annette W. Mitchell
McGowan Fine Art/Concord

Susan Wahlrab: A Year of Grace…..Come Walk the Path

This exhibition of paintings by Susan Wahlrab beautifully demonstrates an understanding that art is more than an eye or a hand. She layers her watercolors, weaving intricate linear movements. In Grandmother, Grandfather Hear My Prayer, one of the largest paintings in the exhibition, we sense an awareness of the psychology of forms.

In Entrance, abstract and representational harmonies come together. The lower quarter of this winter landscape could stand on its own as a dynamic, nonobjective work. Each painting comments on the abstract rhythms of energy that we often take for granted.

The most abstract work in the exhibition is Full Leaf. Without its companion paintings, this work could be viewed as simply a study in texture. Shifts in value and color are subtle but powerful. Wahlrab’s use of color is masterful. Working from a solid understanding of her craft, she dances over problems others would find daunting.

The Boston Globe by Christine Temin December 1986

Susan Wahlrab’s intaglio and oil on paper landscapes — at the Hess Gallery at Pine Manor College 400 Heath St. Chestnut Hill, through December 21 — feature the sort of jumbled, askew spaces found in Northern European Expressionism. The ground in these works won’t lie flat — in the oil on paper "Gavin Hill" a patchwork of greens billows up like a choppy sea: in "Mercredi" and "Alley" two more oils, the ground in the tunnel — like alley puffs up as if about to burst. "Percival". The largest oil in the show, is a pale and icy view of bulging rocks and bare little trees rising up into a fog which seals the outcropping off from the rest of the world. The drawing here is both delicate and powerful.

A founding member of Boston’s Experimental Etching Art’s Cooperative, Wahlrab is known primarily as a printmaker. The black and white intaglios in this show are dark and mysterious views of deep, receding spaces, often with a blinding white light at the end. Although somewhat formulaic, these are accomplished, clearly stated pieces. But the oil on paper works, in which the artist displays an interesting color sense and a flair for brushy surfaces, are the most exciting pieces here.

RESUME l COLLECTIONS l REVIEWS