Susan Stillman holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and an MFA from Brooklyn College. She spent a year in Rome studying painting in RISD’s European Honors Program.
A life-long educator, Stillman has been a faculty member at Parsons School of Design since 1983.
She began her career as an Illustrator and her work has been published in hundreds of magazines, newspapers, posters and books. Her clients have included The New York Times, New York Magazine, Esquire, Beth Israel Medical Center, Conde Nast, Hearst Publications, and numerous others. Stillman was chosen to illustrate a special centennial edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, for Book of the Month Club, and illustrated a children’s book, Windsongs and Rainbows, for Simon and Schuster.
Susan Stillman is well known for her vibrant representations of homes and properties in Westchester and surrounding areas through her previous business, Home Portraits. Home Portraits was featured in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, among others. Her landscape work has been shown in various galleries, most recently in a solo show at the Garrison Art Center in 2023, a retrospective of her paintings at the Northern Westchester Center for the Arts in 2004, and two solo shows at the Gallery in the Park, Cross River, NY.
— Artist's Statement —
The landscape I see every day shapes my work in paint. The views from my windows high on the hill, and my daily walks in all seasons feed my preoccupation with light and the way it effects change in color and tonalities. I have been an observer of this familiar terrain for over 30 years, but I attempt to see it every day as if for the first time.
Series evolve as I revisit images that have left an impression in my memory. I also love to spend time on the road exploring new environments, both in the US and in Europe. These trips have generated their own series, always with light as the main protagonist.
The scale of the work has an impact on how the images are perceived, as larger paintings invite the viewer to enter the space created and smaller scale work feels fragmentary, echoing my experiences of moving through the landscape and noticing flashes of color on the periphery.
An absence of the figure is deliberate, disallowing any imposition of ‘story’ and leaving the focus entirely on the moment captured and it’s specific qualities of light, color and tonal saturation. The simplicity of the subject is transformed by the moment of illumination and by our unexpected attention.
