Susanna Coffey: Going Direct
Serious Topics is elated to present Susanna Coffey: GOING DIRECT, an exhibition of self portraits, observational night paintings, and paintings of women in their studios. Susanna writes:
“Going Direct”: a term used in Astrology and astronomy to describe a planet’s resumption of its normal forward, eastward path across the sky after a period of seemingly backward motion.
In the mid 1950’s my dad, Edwin “Stub” Coffey on occasion met with with some very serious guys at the Monticello Raceway and I got to sit by the rail and watch the harness racers do their training miles. I’d sip my Shirley Temple as the horses bolted from their starting gate, stride past me and disappear down the track. Then, in a short while, like magic those same horses appeared in full trot, pulling their “bikes” right towards me and their finish line. As a small child, I was amazed. As an adult, looking back I realize this was a horse-lovers lesson about the nature of an orbit. Things go away but sometimes can return from what looks to be an opposite direction. Many years later when the Astrologer Kathryn Sapoznick was explaining the Mercury Retrograde, I remembered that circular racetrack and my surprise when those horses flew away from me, were lost from sight only to suddenly be racing towards me.
For most of us, each work of art begins in hope of culmination rather than simple conclusion. As I am a figurative painter who paints from direct observation, my path is not hard to describe. I pretty much
pay attention to the person, place or thing that I think I need to make a painting about. It is not a matter of accomplishing a 2D representation of my motif but rather a crazy need to begin a process of seeing something and acting on that. Choosing what to focus on; that is a matter of psychology and biology and spirit – too much to report. The tools that create evidence of my working gaze are so basic; paints, brushes, a canvas or panel, solvent, and some medium. I set to work well-equipped with influences, my awareness of other artworks. The efforts of any artist are essentially erotic ones. We are all in an embrace of some kind with the works of others. They are always “sitting on our shoulders”. And one copulates with these creations in pairs, thrupples and myriads—angels and devils all. I sit with many conscious or unconscious influences and look at something or someone or someplace and begin to work. But as I, well equipped with concept and material, put the paint down on its surface, the truth of what is in front of me seems to recede, to go away and hopelessly escape my vision. However, I stubbornly believe that at some point the horses will circle the track and I will see a possible, maybe barely adequate, conclusion to the process I started. At those times I feel that my painting represents both a departure from and a return to my initial vision. It is then that that my picture is “going direct” and I know it is headed for its finish line."
Susanna Coffey (b. 1949, New London, Connecticut) is a respected figurative painter whose work in self-portraiture, landscape, still life, and illustration of classical literature is grounded in intense observation of her motif or text. She is known for her ability to create beautifully wrought and expressive imagery from subject matter often deemed abject or mundane, and over more than four decades her work has been widely collected by major institutions.
Her self-portraits are investigations of the iconic human head, driven by a sustained set of questions: what can a portrait image mean? What is a beautiful appearance? Why do conventionally gendered images so often involve caricature? Can inchoate feeling-states be adequately portrayed? Working from direct observation before a mirror, Coffey treats the self-portrait not as a record of likeness but as an ongoing formal and psychological inquiry.Coffey is equally known for her landscape paintings.
Like the self-portraits, these are made from direct observation of her motif, but unlike them, they are always painted at night. The subject of each “night painting” is chosen for the way it transforms in the dark — a gas station, a parking lot, a cow pasture may seem ordinary in daylight, but after dark, for Coffey, these places appear sublime. Her book Night Painting, recently published in its second edition by MAB Books, gathers these nocturnal landscapes alongside essays, poems, and prose poems by Dr. Carol Becker, Brice Brown, Jane Coffey, Jane Kenyon, and Mark Strand. In 1988, Kallichoron Press published her illustrated edition of Apostolos Athanassakis’s English translation of The Homeric Hymn to Demeter.
Coffey is equally known for her landscape paintings. Like the self-portraits, these are made from direct observation of her motif, but unlike them, they are always painted at night. The subject of each “night painting” is chosen for the way it transforms in the dark — a gas station, a parking lot, a cow pasture may seem ordinary in daylight, but after dark, for Coffey, these places appear sublime. Her book Night Painting, recently published in its second edition by MAB Books, gathers these nocturnal landscapes alongside essays, poems, and prose poems by Dr. Carol Becker, Brice Brown, Jane Coffey, Jane Kenyon, and Mark Strand. In 1988, Kallichoron Press published her illustrated edition of Apostolos Athanassakis’s English translation of The Homeric Hymn to Demeter.
Coffey’s work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Academy of Design, the Hood Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, and others.
Her work has been featured in numerous museum exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad, including recent presentations at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the National Academy Museum, New York; the Yale University Art Gallery; the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College; and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece.
Coffey has also maintained an exceptional record of solo exhibitions, including After Dark at Whitespace Gallery, Atlanta (2024); In Her Studio at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York (2019); Crimes of the Gods at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects (2018); and Blue at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York (2003). Alongside these institutional exhibitions, Coffey has exhibited extensively with influential galleries including Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, Alpha Gallery (Boston), and Galeria Alejandro Sales (Barcelona).
In 2020 she was one of the recipients of the Artist x Artist Award given by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Other honors include the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Award, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, along with honorary degrees from the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design and the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts. Her many one-person exhibitions have been written about in The New York Times, Art in America, Art News, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, and other publications, and her work has been included or featured in several books and monographs.