The Gallery at Flat Rock is thrilled to present a solo exhibition by Hendersonville artist Susan Webb Tregay from August 4 through 21. “Triple Vision” will highlight Susan’s artworks in acrylics and mixed media, including “Range of Motion,” “Turning the Tables,” and her “Free-Range Children” series, as well as a series of landscapes created during COVID called “Where the Rivers Flow West.”
An opening reception for “Triple Vision” will take place from 5-7 p.m. on Thursday, August 4.
Susan is a signature member and award winner in the prestigious American Watercolor Society and the National Watercolor Society and is the author of the 2007 book “Master Disaster: Five Ways to Rescue Desperate Watercolors.”
“Susan is so technically gifted it allows her the freedom to explore creatively,” says The Gallery at Flat Rock owner Suzanne Camarata. “I like that she takes serious subjects—like kids not playing outside much anymore—and address the topic in a playful way in a series of artworks.”
Known for her vivid paintings peopled with jubilant figures in landscapes with flattened perspectives, Susan remains a fearless artist who is continually pushing limits in her creative process to keep the process interesting and the resulting work as fascinating and strong as possible. In 1991, Susan heard a quote by American artist Jasper Johns that inspired her to reexamine how she approaches making art, in a kind of “triple vision” synthesis: “Take something. Do something with it. Then do something else with it.”
“I now ‘Jasper Johns’ each of my paintings,” she says. “Pushing each piece beyond my own wildest imagination allows me to project my fleeting ideas and impressions onto paper and canvas. Each piece is a new adventure.” Susan credits her experience teaching art all over the country to increasing her boldness and humor to keep her students’ attention, an attitude that spread beyond her personality by a kind of osmosis to become part of her painting style. The “triple vision” inspired by the Johns quote has pushed Susan to continually seek new ideas and techniques, which she says pop up to “cure” her paintings on a daily basis. “When you get bored that’s when it gets interesting. I have a whale of a time painting.”
The series of paintings in “Triple Vision” convey the range of Susan’s ideas according to themes that are full of energetic action. “Range of Motion” depicts a life unfolding while “Turning the Tables” explores the “frustration in that all of the advances that we see in this world seem to circle on back to almost where we started.” Susan’s large series in acrylics, “Free Range Children” (a.k.a. “No Child Left Inside”), depicts a vanishing lifestyle from the time “when kids rode their bikes until the streetlights came on.” Lastly, a series of mixed media landscapes based on the view from her home’s front windows that face the Eastern Continental Divide illustrates the locus of the line where the rivers in western North Carolina flow west. “These small landscapes are formatted like old Polaroid photographs to suggest age,” says Susan. “These paintings, in mostly watercolor, are small gems of the streams that are accessible to everyone.”