This Sunday, Suzanne Dell’Orto presented her new series of handmade paper paintings based on her direct observation of the landscape and waterscape surfaces of freshwater ponds.

Installed along the supports of the Honey Locust Tree, the handmade paper’s bright colors, accessible scale, and horizontal orientation invoked the spirit of a festive holiday, or, in the context our Chinatown neighborhood, an auspicious event marked by prayer flags.

Equal parts harmony and dissonance between treescape and the color and shapes and gestures of Dell’Orto’s paper waterscapes made a joyful noise that engages not only a classical macro landscape with Monet-like intensity but also the contemporary spunk and energy of a painter like Elizabeth Murray.

The artist says:

These pieces are based on a series of my photographs of the accumulation of leaves, plants, and algae on the surface of freshwater ponds.

My work is inspired by accumulations of objects, living things and ideas that make patterns and piles and swarms. The result can be soothing and orderly, chaotic and anxiety-producing, but it creates opportunities for the collision of large and small moments.

The work

Below, some of the individual pieces from Accumulations, showing front and back simultaneously. All pieces are handmade paper, approximately 21 cm x 15 cm.

If you would like more information, please contact Suzanne Dell’Orto directly at http://www.modomnoc.net

About the artist

Suzanne Dell’Orto earned her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, and her Master’s Degree in Studio Art from New York University’s Venice Program. She has been exhibiting her work since 1995. She had her first solo exhibition at the Molloy College Art Gallery in 2004, and in 2006 she curated the show Stuck: The Influence of Collage on 21st Century there, which was reviewed in the New York Times.

She has exhibited at Galeria AAB, Brescia, Italy; the Dryfoos Gallery at Kean University in Union, NJ; the Hunter College Gallery in New York, NY; Artists Space in New York, NY; Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ, Redsaw Gallery in Newark, NJ, and Tinku Gallery in Toronto, Canada. She is a practicing artist, curator, and designer, and she is a design educator at Baruch College in New York City.