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rarely do justice to abstract paintings and this is particularly true of Susan
Gunn’s giant highly-polished gessos. In print they can fail to excite;
in life they cannot help but impress with their sheer size and their evocative
topography redolent of the mysteries that lie just below the surface of a
parched earth or, by contrast, in the pool of a highly reflective surface.
It’s two months before her next exhibition and Susan Gunn is in her
studio on the outskirts of Norwich putting the finishing touches to her final
pieces; in total she hopes to submit 33 works ranging in price from £1000
to £25,000 to the Norwich Castle. She brushes her gesso – stained
with a black pigment – onto a strip of canvas taped off neatly with
masking tape. This is the umpteenth thin layer of gesso and once left, will
dry to produce Susan’s trademark cracked and fissured surfaces. She
controls the rate at which the gesso dries – and the severity of the
cracks – by controlling her studio’s atmospheric conditions.
Afterwards she will remove the masking tape to reveal her painting’s
design of geometric sections. She will then polish the work with a wax to
achieve a smooth, marble sheen; a process she describes as ‘laborious
and repetitive and denotes a certain absurdity, like the perennial gesture
of cleaning and laundering’.
Overall, Susan will have spent at least 4 months on her last canvas, cajoling
gesso – a calcium carbonate substance ideal for priming wood and Masonite
– to behave on canvas in a way that artists have traditionally been
at great pains to avoid: to crack.
Susan’s interest in gesso dates back to 2000 when a paragraph in Ralph
Mayer’s book, The Artist's Handbook of Materials and Techniques, describing
the ‘undesirable’ nature of cracked gesso on canvas, prompted
her to experiment with what she had until that point seen simply as a primer.
‘I wanted to take something that was “highly undesirable”
and make it work,’ she says, standing in front of her very first gesso
canvas, Unicus; a large expanse of pearly white shot through with a filigree
of cracks. ‘It’s what appealed to the rebel in me.’...
This is only a small part of the article.
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