SUZANNE STRYK •   BRISTOL, VA

Stryk’s paintings merge observation with imagination in a dreamlike blend of precise knowledge and myth. She gives us images that invite us to ponder the deep connection of precious life forms.

Born in Chicago, Suzanne Stryk currently lives amid the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Stryk received her BA from Northern Illinois University and her MA from East Tennessee State University. Suzanne has shown in numberous solo and group exhibitions all over the United States. Her mixed media work can be found in numerous museum collections throughout the country, including the Smithsonian (DC), The Taubman Museum of Art (Roanoke, VA), and The David Brower Center (Berkeley, CA).  She is the recipient of a George Sugarman Foundation grant and a Virginia Commission for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship. 

Suzanne currently works from her studio in Virginia.

 

Outside my studio last summer, I picked up a blackbird’s egg that had fallen from its nest. Back inside my studio, I carefully placed the egg on my drawing table, where it became a sketch, rather than a fledgling. It then became part of my collection, and would later find itself in a painting. Now, a row of eggs glistens from the black background of a painting on my easel, each detailed with umber calligraphic streaks under a smooth glaze, and each labeled with a tiny white number. One egg’s cracked open. Above it I’ve sculpted a wild nest in rough relief, branches splayed right and left—a chaos of sticks. Order, wildness, potential, reality, out there, in here—all in my thoughts as the living world passes through eye, mind, and hand to make an image.


ASSOCIATED EXHIBITIONS

Suzanne Stryk_ The Middle of Somewhere
SHOWCASE GALLERY
May 6 - June 22, 2022
MAIN GALLERY
November 5 - December 29, 2021