Suzan Woodruff

With a career spanning 4 decades, Suzan Woodruff is well known for her luminous, ethereal, and yet deeply grounded abstractions. Utilizing a physically demanding painting process, Woodruff creates paintings that are marked by cascading patterns that seem to change as the eye moves across the painting - colors shift, forms appear and recede, the light changes. Born in Phoenix, AZ, Woodruff’s creative life began at an early age. Raised by her gold-prospector grandparents who taught her how to read rocks and by her desert-bohemian mother, Woodruff immersed herself in the desert’s infinite spaces, stark light, and spectacular vistas. Over her decades in the art world, Woodruff has done everything from large scale murals to pocket sized illustrations. Woodruff’s early work is marked by hints of what has become her signature cascading patterns. In 2003, Woodruff designed her gravity easel - an omni-directional pivoting table that can hold a 10x6 foot painting. Working closely with Jack Brogan, noted fabricator to the California Light & Space artists of the last 60 years, Woodruff’s vision was brought to reality and the gravity easel, in multiple sizes, became central to her work, allowing her to push her paintings to new levels of complexity. Over the last 5 years, Woodruff has survived the darkness of three major surgeries and radiation for near-lethal oral cancer. The surgeries left her unable to eat or speak for almost three years. There is no comprehending for those outside - and yet what Woodruff has done is what artists for eons have done - to excavate the depths of their personal experiences in their work. Woodruff has poured the emotional energy of one who has returned from the far edges of a soul crushing illness into her work - there is an exquisite joy to these works - a wonder, an exhilaration.