Abstract 15

Sue Averell has always been drawn to the moment when a landscape loses its edges — when a San Francisco street dissolves into colour, when a botanical form becomes pure movement. This diptych lives in that threshold. It began, as so many of her abstracts do, with a field of blue: the particular blue of the Bay she has looked at from her Sausalito studio for more than two decades, layered and relayered until it became something between water and sky, between memory and sensation. Then came the lines. Averell's dripped and poured tendrils of white, red, ochre, and dark violet rise and fall across both canvases like living things — like kelp in a current, like grasses in wind, like the graphic lines of her early design training translated into pure painterly instinct. The upper panel holds them in a kind of suspension, each line singular and deliberate. The lower panel lets go entirely, the marks multiplying, tangling, pooling into bursts of yellow and red that feel like sudden sunlight breaking through deep water. To stand before this diptych is to feel the pull of two states at once: the calm of immersion and the thrill of being carried. It is the kind of work that asks you to keep looking, and keeps giving the longer you do — a quality that has defined Averell's practice across every series she has explored since she first opened her Sausalito studio.