Abstract 18

Sue Averell has always painted from the inside out — beginning with what accumulates beneath the surface before deciding what the world gets to see. In this painting, the green comes on strong, the way a California hillside does in the brief weeks after winter rain, insistent and overwhelming. But Sue knows that no landscape is only what it shows you. She works her acrylic and polymers into the canvas in thick, restless layers, and then she pulls back, opens rifts, lets the buried world breathe. What emerges through those openings is a kind of visual archaeology — cobalt blue sky fragments, cloud-white passages, earthy ochres and reds, tiny celebrations of orange that pop like wildflowers through a meadow. It is a painting about what lies just below the visible surface of any living place, the complexity that sustains what we see. After years painting San Francisco streets, Thai landscapes, and the wild Marin headlands just across the bay from her Sausalito gallery, Sue has learned that the most honest landscapes are the ones that admit their own depth. Standing before this painting, you feel that admission — the generous, rumbling joy of a world that will not stay tidy or singular, that insists on its own glorious mess. It is the feeling of being outside in a place that is older and more alive than anything you could plan.