This strikingly distinctive piece made its way to me from California artist Susan McAllister. While Susan's work encompasses other styles and themes, these black-white-red semi-abstractions seem to be a regularly recurring motif in her oeuvre, sometimes worked into more recognizably human forms, at other times resisting classification. Her mastery of this simplified palette and her unique working of form is virtually a signature of her work. Once having seen her work, it would be a challenge to do anything that doesn't visually echo what she's done here; her images seem to burn themselves into your retinal memory.
To my eye, I see even the most abstract of her shapes as bioforms. Whether human or alien, plant or animal, there is something undeniably lifelike about the figures populating her landscapes. The piece above can be seen as both rose and/or mythic woman; indeed, the colors are those of the Great Mother--virgin (white), mother/bride (red), crone (black). The dots and lines have a correlation with cartooning and the line-work with tattooing. The color, though restricted as already noted, is applied with great subtlety and for maximum power. The piece aggressively jumps out at you. I submit as evidence the fact that my husband, casually passing my desk, which always looks like a landscape from one of the more violent chapters of the Book of Revelation, spotted it immediately among the ongoing apocalypse. His admiration for the piece mirrored my own. It joins another that I'm already fortunate to have in my collection of mail art. Thank you Susan.
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