Susanne Kamalieh is an Iranian American artist residing in Northern Virginia. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in math and started graduate studies in computer science at WayneState University in Detroit. However, she had always found herself attracted to the creative process of art making and taken art classes on the side. Before long she made a drastic switch to studying studio arts and graduated from New York University with a master’s degree in painting in 1978.
For the next six years she lived and practiced art in Iran where she had the opportunity to exhibit her work, meet talented artists and was part of the vibrant and flourishing art circles in the country. She curated art exhibitions at the Niavaran Cultural Center which brought her in contact with the established as well as the emerging artists, and was fascinated by teaching art at all levels and ages, from university classes all the way to pre-school children. The experience was invaluable for the development of her own creativity.
Her long artistic career did experience interruptions due to her immigration to the US and family obligations. But art was always her main mental occupation. She half-jokingly refers to those periods of inactivity as her “conceptual period” since her ideas would not materialize into concrete works of art!
Susanne’s work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally, and owned by art museums, cultural centers and private collectors. Her style has evolved over the years from hyper-realism (human figures, cityscapes, …) to the current exploration of color, texture and abstract forms. Her work reflects her past experiences carried into new investigation of the natural world, tangible as well as intangible, positive and negative space translated into visual elements of line, color, shape, and pattern.
Statement
My current work is informed by my environmental concerns as well as my spiritual beliefs.
Layers of transparency are created through undulating, wavelike lines, transparent colors and patterned shapes. They attempt to visualize the invisible space, the atmosphere, the air around us, the energies that connect us, all that is imperceptible to human senses but exist all around us. Waves, energies, particles, etc. that we can’t see with the naked eye, and tend to ignore, dismiss, and often neglect.
My intention is to capture and represent the unrepresented, the unseen, the unremembered, the ignored: our environment and our connections.
The wave lines, depicting the atmospheric energy – light waves, sound waves, electromagnetic, etc. fill the page, just as the empty space surrounding and in-between objects, what we commonly refer to as the “negative space”. The lines are flowing and travelling through this space, colliding, reflecting, refracting, creating new points, secondary lines and shapes that are organic, ephemeral, transient, in motion, lifelike.
In the process the negative space becomes the positive space and determines the subject matter of the artwork. The space that seems to separate us becomes the medium that connects us.
