Abstract 17

Sue Averell has always painted the world as she feels it, not merely as she sees it — and this canvas carries the emotional weight of every landscape she has ever stood inside. The luminous yellow sky at the top feels like a memory of California light, the kind that floods the hills above Sausalito in late afternoon, burning gold before it softens. But beneath that brightness, the earth is complex and restless: dark forms rise and fall, rivers of blue push through earth tones, and frantic marks of red and black flare up like the pulse of a city at night. There is a horizon line buried in the middle of the composition — faint, horizontal, almost architectural — that anchors the entire storm of color above and below it. It is the kind of horizon Averell has chased her whole career, from the streets of San Francisco to the riverways of Thailand, from the granite slabs of Bangalore to the shores of the U.S. Virgin Islands. This painting is not about one place. It is about the feeling of arriving somewhere vast and unfamiliar and finding, to your surprise, that you already know it. The unpainted white edges of the stretched canvas are left deliberately exposed, a framing device that feels both intimate and honest — as if the viewer has caught the painting mid-thought, mid-breath. It is a work that rewards time. The longer you stand before it, the more the chaos resolves into something coherent and deeply felt: a landscape of the interior, as much as of the earth.