Susan Sills

Susan Sills is an American artist effective in the international art scene in the past the prematurely 1990s. Although she has created abstract ink drawings and painted commissioned portraits, Sills is best known for her life-size painted wood cutouts based upon the Old Masters. Sills has produced over 100 substitute wood cutouts, and finds objector ways to bring these well-known icons of art into the gift day. Her behave is found in collections in Japan, New York City, and throughout the United States. Sills has had 20 solo exhibitions and participated in numerous action shows. Sills is based in Brooklyn, New York.

Most of Sills's performance consists of life-size wood cutouts of Old Master subjects. While preserving the atmosphere 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 ventilate of each of their originators." In order to bring each two-dimensional air into a three-dimensional space, Sills reproduces them on the scale of actual humans and surrounds them subsequent to props, some of which are purposefully anachronistic. For example, her wood cutout of Princess Margarita from Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas is the similar size as a real child. Sills's cutout of the pubescent subject from Édouard Manet′s The Fifer (1994; Rowan University Art Gallery, Sylvia Sleigh Collection) is as well as the similar size as a genuine child. In Utamaro, Utamaro, I'll See Utamaro, Sills's cutouts of Kitagawa Utamaro′s Geisha next String and Geisha following Mirror are "seated" on a real straw mat back a few blank McDonald's containers, two blank 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 pretentious 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 allocation of Michelangelo′s original.

Although artists have been painting “after the Old Masters” for centuries, Sills “has been qualified as owning the art form of the painted cutout.” Ed McCormack has suggested that Sills's cutouts show “how great works of art come into our lives to stay” and “make the world a improved place by their presence.” Her behave demonstrates that “the undertaking of painters long dead can continue to have a necessary presence in the activity and sham of contemporary artists” and that even in the 21st century, artists and viewers can find a habit to relate to art from centuries ago.