Sue Bartfield

You might be surprised to know that I do not consider myself an abstract artist, nor do I consider my work abstract. Rather I am in love with painting, not just the intellectual process of creating images but even moreso the physical act, the movement and sensation of my body, the feel of the brush, the odor of the paint. It seems to me that something of this physicality, and my almost obsessive relationship to it, has found its way into my work. That is to say that each painting is not only an expression of my interior--the interior of the artist--but just as much an expression of the physical act of making it.
My work begins as a story told in images and ends as only images, nothing but images, countless images, images intersecting and images piled atop one another. One of my favorite things is when people looking at my work discover shapes and images I had never myself imagined or intended. When they do, I never tell them that they are wrong; for they are not. They are simply discovering themselves in that in which I discovered myself.