Susan Sills is an Americans artist involved in the international art scene since the early 1990s. Although she has created abstract ink drawings[ "Six Brooklyn artists to exhibit at fifth Contemporary Art Fair NYC" Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Retrieved 2017-08-01.]
Work
Most of Sills's work consists of life-size wood cutouts of
Old Masters subjects. While preserving the character and style of each iconic figure, she reimagines it in the context of today's world.
As noted by Marilyn Becker, Sills's works have been "painstakingly painted in the style, technique and manner of each of their originators."
In order to bring each two-dimensional character into a three-dimensional space, Sills reproduces them on the scale of actual humans and surrounds them with props, some of which are deliberately anachronistic. For example, her wood cutout of Princess Margarita from Diego Velázquez's
Las Meninas is the same size as a real child. Sills's cutout of the young subject from Édouard Manet′s
The Fifer (1994;
Rowan University,
Sylvia Sleigh) is also the same size as a real child.
In
Utamaro, Utamaro, I'll See Utamaro, Sills's cutouts of
Kitagawa Utamaro′s
Geisha with String and
Geisha with Mirror are "seated" on a real straw mat before a few empty McDonald's containers, two empty
Pepsi cans, and pairs of chopsticks. The two life-size figures are painted in Utamaro's style, but reimagined in the context of the 21st-century world of fast food and carbonated beverages. In
After Rivera, The Flower Carrier, the man from
Diego Rivera’s painting is kneeling on an artificial patch of grass and flowers. Another work,
What Sybil Saw, features the prophet from
Michelangelo's
Delphic Sybil. At her feet are several scroll-like photographs of
David, which were obviously not a part of Michelangelo′s original.
Although artists have been painting “after the Old Masters” for centuries, Sills “has been recognized as owning the art form of the painted cutout.”
