Susanne Forestieri

Here are a two of my recent large abstracts.

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 13:40:45 -0700

Here are a two of my recent large abstracts.

3 Bad Sheep

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 11:40:39 -0700

Every Wednesday night Alexander “Sky” Carranza, Eddie Canumay and Alexander P. Huerta meet in Alex’s small PeaceNart Studio in the Arts Factory and transform into the 3 Bad Sheep collaborative. Carefully navigating among the paint cans and panels they set to work - starting new pieces and finishing others. Remarkably, they trust each other enough to start a work as an individual and then hand it off to one or another of the “sheep” to finish.

Alex Huerta working on the patio of the Arts Factory.

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 11:33:06 -0700

Alex Huerta working on the patio of the Arts Factory.

My students at Step-up Academy working hard on their horse...

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 20:30:55 -0700

Mathilda & Cody

Keira & C.J

My students at Step-up Academy working hard on their horse drawings.

My Young Students at Step-up Academy Learning to Draw a...

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 21:06:47 -0700

My Young Students at Step-up Academy Learning to Draw a Horse’s Head and Body

OLGA’S COLLAGE GET-TOGETHER

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 18:02:00 -0700

Olga collaging her earlier watercolors

Audrey collaging a papier mache bird

OLGA’S COLLAGE GET-TOGETHER

Keith Richards - Composite pastel drawing done by my UNLV...

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 09:34:53 -0700

Keith Richards -

Composite pastel drawing done by my UNLV Drawing 2 students.

Each square is 8 x 8 inches.

Steven Spann Artist-in-Residence at the Cosmopolitan Steven is...

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 11:20:26 -0700

Steven Spann Artist-in-Residence at the Cosmopolitan

Steven is explaining how he turns trash into works of art. The work behind us is made of discarded Sterno lids.

These are two of my seven paintings of dancers on exhibit at the...

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:10:00 -0700

Jazz Dancer I

Jazz Dancer II

These are two of my seven paintings of dancers on exhibit at the Historic Fifth Street School in downtown Las Vegas. The exhibition is titled ” Rhythm Repetition Movement” and is up through May 22. By appt. only 229-1012

Kids Art Classes

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 09:12:30 -0700

Jennie has been studying with me since the fall. She has done drawings and paintings - winning first place in her school competition for an acrylic painting of sunflowers.

Jennie Painting

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 09:09:46 -0700

Jennie Painting

Kids Art Classes

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 19:55:36 -0700

I’ve resumed giving art lessons to kids.

Classes are held on Saturdays.

Contact me for times and fees at:

sforestieri@hotmail.com

702-893-7711

Art class Imprints Day School

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 19:50:00 -0700

Art class Imprints Day School

Art class Clark Co. elementary school

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 17:51:00 -0700

Art class Clark Co. elementary school

My Sojourn in New Mexico These are two of the forty paintings I...

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 11:44:00 -0700

Blue Figure II- Oil on Panel

Flamenca III - Oil on Panel

My Sojourn in New Mexico

These are two of the forty paintings I did in New Mexico in the last five months. I’ve returned to Las Vegas from Santa Fe. Many of these works will be on exhibit at the Art Factory in the coming months. In April of 2011 I’ll be returning to Santa Fe for an exhibit of my work at the Eli Levin Studio on Canyon Road.

Measure Twice, Cut Once

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 07:40:56 -0700

September 23, 2009

Now that women have metaphorically gotten out of the kitchen, it is safely visited as a warm nostalgia place. Brenda Jones’ stitchery exhibition at the Charleston Heights Art Center is a witty, sometimes elegant reimagining of your grandmother’s aprons and bridal garments.

(For more see my Sept. 17 review titled “Overly Measured” at www.lasvegasweekly.com )

The Colorman by Erika Wood

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 20:38:37 -0700

I think artists will be interested in this book. I found it fascinating.

The Colorman – a novel by Erika Wood

The art world of Manhattan, with its pretentious artists, and a bucolic Hudson River town, home to a mysterious paint manufacturer, are the settings for this tale of love loss and redemption. What impresses me most about this Dickensian tale of a motherless waif, a cold stepmother, and a strange man with a murky past is its rare description of the tormenting and thrilling process of making art:

It was formulaic and facile. It was predictable and pompous. Deceitful and dead. It was just plain bad, and it was sticking to her like fly paper.

Rain gripped the stretcher bar and plunged her box cutter straight into the canvas. Past its gooey facade and into the weave. …Yanking the blade out again, Rain hauled off and slashed the canvas straight through from left to right.

Each stab was a release. Each slash unburdened barriers she hadn’t realized she’d constructed.

The plot follows a typical girl-overcomes-adversity pattern. Rain Morton, an aspiring young artist with a seemingly idyllic existence, has everything going for her – a doting father who’s a renowned author, a successful art dealer stepmother and a well connected art critic husband. But life unravels when her husband has an affair then sabotages her career only to leave Rain spiraling downward in an orgy of self-pity. Numbed by booze, reality TV, and the internet, she one day finds inspiration from an improbable location: a county sheriff’s site, and more improbably from the pigments given to her by James Morrow, the novel’s mysterious and reclusive paint manufacturer. The down and dirty physicality of his arcane and ancient methods– scavenging road kill, grinding bones and cooking fat– bolster Rain’s uncertain steps as she reaches for a truer, more authentic form of expression.

Honesty and authenticity thus transform what might have been a simple chick lit piece into an insightful explication of the art making process, one that could only come from real experience. The importance of light and color to a painter is built into the structure of the novel by naming chapters for each color in the rainbow, with the addition of black (the absence of color) and white (all parts of the visible spectrum). The feeling each color evokes is beautifully illustrated by quotes from a wide range of poets, artists and musicians, as in the following Jimi Hendrix quote:.

PURPLE

Purple haze all in my brain

Lately things just don’t seem the same

Actin’funny, but I don’t know why

‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky.

– Jimi Hendrix

Hendrix associates purple with a definite mental state, whereas other writer’s color associations are more oblique, but they always illustrate an interaction between thinking and feeling that is necessary for the production of art. This is further underscored in the beginning of each chapter by a catalogue of associations we have with a color and by historical details about the origin and manufacture of pigments– “Purple is royalty, a connotation that has everything to do with the extreme value of the pigments available for cloth-dying in antiquity.” Wood writes. “Tyrian purple was the original purple dye, created from tiny snail-like mollusks.” The quest for truth and beauty amid the sordid reality of life is thus the real story of The Colorman and readers will be delighted to learn that in order to write this book, Wood, who had some previous experience fabricating three-dimensional abstract pieces, started drawing portraits which readers can find on her website.

John Updike on Art

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 19:58:42 -0800

With the death of John Updike we not only lost one of our most important novelists and essayists, but a writer with an unusal sensitivity to visual art. His two collections of essays “Just Looking” and “Still Looking” are a revelation. He examines the individual works and often the entire ouvre of many well-known artists, placing them in the context of their time and highlighting their particular talents. He weaves in biographical information which sheds light on their artistic development and puts into words concepts not easily apprehended.

Susanne Forestieri - Fine Artist

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 11:18:12 -0800

Susanne Forestieri - Fine Artist:

Please visit my website to see my paintings and find links to articles about me.

Obama Student Drawings

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 11:11:35 -0800

The following images are of Susanne Forestieri’s beginning drawing students at UNLV working on their collage drawings of Barack Obama.