By Mark Clinton Davis

Bay Area painter Susan Synarski, b. 1956 Westover AFB, Chicopee MA.

Susan Synarski began her formal art education at Eastern New Mexico University--"out on the plains, you could spit to Texas from there. It was all churches and peanut farms." She went on to finish her BA in 1982 at CSU, Sacramento, where she studied with Oliver Jackson and Joan Moment. The artist later entered the graduate program at San Francisco State University, studied with Robert Bechtel, Paul Pratchenko and Cheri Raciti and received her MFA 1991. She now resides in Oakland, CA.

Growing up Synarski moved numerous times: Plattsburg NY, Macon GA, Roswell, NM, Minot ND, Mesa AZ, etc. before graduating high school in Albuquerque, NM, and developed the military brat's sense of displaced and detached rootlessness as well as a cosmopolite's voyeurism and the anthropological sense of the outsider.

Achieving her graduate degree at the height of the frenzied New York art boom, she shunned the circus typified by Mark Kostabi and high performance art, and chose to pursue the craft of painting in a quieter and more personal exploration. Her early work was in large-scale acrylic canvases characterised by a figural style pared to basic elements and an energetic use of color, pattern and line influenced by Philip Guston.

In early works such as "El Paso" in which a sombre menacing geometric figure appears to monitor a desolate landscape the major themes of Synarski's work began to emerge: exclusion/inclusion, the imposition of arbitrary systems and surveillance. They are difficult paintings, deceptive in their cartoon-like presentation, an element of style the artist parlayed into a successful career as a commercial illustrator in the 1990s working for Rolling Stone, Out, The New Yorker and other magazines. But even in this work and her illustrations for books like
"Booty: Girl Pirates on the High Seas" Synarski has never been able to fully shrug off the adult themes at hand and there is an undeniable political dimension in her choice of illustration work which is both feminist and gender -bending.

But it is the more personal work using elements of this visual style and infusing them with sly ironies and taut metaphors that has come to identify the artist. She paints a universe of expectations but also one in which expectation is thwarted. The well-oiled machines of society have gone awry--a mower mowing through flowerbeds. Often there are backgrounds of polluted landscapes and references to walkie-talkies, microphones, transmitters, or radio signals. We see the suggestion of technologies that enable predation of the self and of one’s privacy by society and media.

In "The Party's Over" a pink voyeuristic figure in a heated gloomy landscape stands beside a black wedding cake topped by a television bride and groom. In "Square Green" an Argus-eyed green figure smokes in a night-lit alley, a broken window behind him, a microphone suspended above. This painting suggests mood without defining it, like the world of film noir with its moral ambiguities, double crosses, private detectives and urban nightscapes. It is as though night is a last refuge of the hunted.

Synarski's recent work, tiny gouaches on paper reminiscent of Indian miniature painting, incorporate her use of humor and metaphor in iconic, boldly-colored personal geometries mindful of a spiritual arcanum. This includes a recent series of god figures like "Volcano" in which a fire-haired magma figure emerges from a lava field matches in hand, ciggy in mouth, poised yet ready to explode and "Abominable Snowman" wherein another multi-armed earth god holds blocks of ice while sitting yogi-like above a terrain from which the frozen foot of a lost climber protrudes. Though some of these works are no are larger than playing cards, none of the monumentality of the artist’s earlier, larger pieces is lost because of their careful and superb composition.

These recent works are a superb introduction to an artist whose work has evolved and honed its greater themes even as her paintings have continued to diminish in size. This is an artist whose metaphors of hunted, haunted alienation describe a discombobulated universe, mindful of the amok society we have accreted. This is an artist in mid-career whose importance has only begun to be appreciated.


This monograph was published in The Archive, TheJournal of the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art. Foundation, Autummn 2004, Issue #14