S T White - About

About Suzanne

Suzanne White lives on a small farm in Appleton Maine with her husband Court Bennett, five Belgian Shepherd dogs, a herd of Katahdin sheep, and other beasts both furred and feathered. She is an avid gardener; she trains dogs in herding and tracking. She is a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University. Trained as a painter Suzanne currently is learning photography and this represents her first body of work in this medium.

In the mid seventies, she received a traveling fellowship from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and spent the next few years working her way around the world overland spending most of her time in Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Far East. Her interest in the natural world also took her to Central America and Peru several times during the 1980's and 90's where she studied flora and fauna of the tropical forest canopy.

Also during the 1970's & 1980's Ms. White showed extensively in the New England Area and was represented by the Cutler/Stavaridis Gallery and the Zoe Gallery in Boston where she had several solo exhibitions. Her work also was in many significant group exhibitions at the DeCordova Museum, Fitchburg Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Newport Art Museum, Art Institute of Boston, and Northeastern University.

In early 1990's she was retained as an 'Absolut' Vodka artist and her paintings were reproduced in USA Today, Connoisseur Magazine, Arts and Antiques, and Forbes Magazine.

Ms. White's work is on permanent display in the Church of St. Denis, Tour Tour, France; Carillon Importers, Teaneck, NJ; DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; Bank of Boston; and Nichols Institute, Los Angeles, CA. She is also represented in numerous private collections throughout the United States and Europe.

I am drawn to animals and the natural world as inspiration for my work both in painting and in photography. I appreciate animals as subject matter in my photographs for their lack of artifice and the immediacy of their presence. This often goes unnoticed in our observations of creatures other than humans. As a subtext there is an underlying fascination with a darker side; decay, death, and abandonment.

I see my painting as multi-layered dreams or an expression of moments during our waking life where one bears both conscious and unconscious thoughts and visions. On the other hand I look at my photographs as simple everyday expressions; moments perhaps in their own way revealing the unseen or the layered. I expect a good piece, be it painting or a photograph to take on a life of its own and bear up to repeated scrutiny like a book that can be read and re-read. In my work I like to see any or all of the following: layers of meaning, ambiguity, sensuality, lusciousness of surface or texture, beauty and its fragility, instability, hope, paradox, and the puzzle of time.

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