Contributed by John Goodrich / The act of painting is enough to befuddle the ordered mind. We can grasp its basic ingredients: the lines that divide a surface, directing the eye and locating forms and details; the tones that lend mysterious weight to light, fleshing out volumes and intervals; the colors that recast tones with a new dimensionality of hues and intensities. But each of these ingredients continuously rejiggers the others. Where to begin? How to finish? The challenge is hardly new. In 1765, addressing the jury of the Académie Française, the great painter Chardin pictured how “a thousand unhappy painters have broken their brushes between their teeth out of despair.” Every artist, of course, ends up finding their own way, favoring one or another of these ingredients. For some, the actions of color are especially crucial, and do more than cast objects in a luminous light; the pressures and intervals of color leverage an overall design, illuminating how objects occupy the world framed by a painting. Judging by the work now on display at Lori Bookstein Projects, Susannah Phillips is one such colorist.
