Abstract 17 (II)

There is a moment in the act of painting when control and surrender meet — and Sue Averell has spent her career finding that exact threshold. This canvas feels like one of those moments captured in paint and polymer, frozen in time but somehow still moving. The broad cyan field reads like an open sky over the Bay, the kind of light that floods through the studio windows at Gallery Sausalito on a clear morning, impossibly bright, impossibly blue. Into that light, Averell has dragged, scraped and poured a world of accumulated sensation: the dense, fractured masses along the canvas edges that recall the layered visual noise of the urban landscapes she first painted in San Francisco, the dripping reds that speak of urgency and vitality, the warm yellows that flare up like sudden warmth on a cold day. The painting does not tell a single story — it holds many at once, the way a long-practised painter's hand carries memory even when the mind is moving freely. Averell studied at Art Center College of Design before spending years in graphic design, and that training in visual structure is still present here, felt rather than seen, in the way the chaos organises itself into something coherent and deeply satisfying. The grey mass at the centre is almost architectural, almost landscape, almost nothing at all — and in that ambiguity lies the painting's emotional power. To stand before this work is to feel simultaneously the openness of sky and the density of lived experience pressing in from every side. It is exhilarating and grounding at once — which is, perhaps, the most honest description of what it means to make art in a place as beautiful and relentless as the San Francisco Bay Area.