Susan Roth – interview: ‘Art can be made by anybody at anytime, anywhere with anything. That’s the gospel!’

The American painter Susan Roth talks about working in the ‘trenches of our time, where time bends and folds’, the ‘roiling’ surfaces of her shaped canvases, her recent works in synthetic stone, and being filled with ‘radical hope’

Susan Roth. Photo: Alec Erlebacher.

by SAM CORNISH

I believe Susan Roth is one of the great unrecognised abstract artists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Born in 1950, she lives and works outside Syracuse, New York State. Roth’s art principally comes out of a deep engagement with American abstract expressionist and colour field painting, but questions and extends many aspects of their legacies. In the early 80s, she began to make shaped canvases with dynamic and irregularly shaped edges, and with relief-like surfaces, that by the 90s encompassed found objects, such as porcelain or glass. A tireless material innovator, she has also made steel sculpture and currently works with synthetic stone. Her art is wide-ranging, with great physical and imaginative breadth, and suggests that innovation in abstract art is still possible.

Sam Cornish: Hello, Susan. I have just realised that our previous published conversation was now more than five years ago. You began then by writing about the state of the world; I certainly don’t think many people in the US or the UK think we are in a better place in 2025.

I recently read Timothy Hyman’s suggestion that “the panoramic almost always carries an optimistic implication”. He was focused on Siena in the middle ages, but he made me think of the panoramas central to so much great 20th-century American painting, whether Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler or Jules Olitski. Your images still do, at times, spread laterally. But the paintings you have made since the early 80s seem to tackle the panorama head on, and call it into question, with their dense surfaces and often aggressively cut and shaped edges. Do you agree, and is optimism, or its opposite, a useful way of thinking about this change?

Susan Roth: It’s good evening here; good night there!

I agree that the psychology of the wide view, the unobstructed view is optimistic. Kenneth Noland stripes are the quintessential American panorama, though Barnett Newman’s influence is often overlooked. Examining the map closer shows a more comprehensive picture, including the shadows or crevices that are part of the panorama.

Much of my aesthetic is found in Tolstoy. He says the smoke of battle is beautiful from a distance. I am not on the hill observing; rather, I am in the trenches of our time, where time itself bends and folds. You can talk about those beautiful puffs of musket smoke in a Manet painting, but you know those guys are dying. These are not the times for big, bright, beautiful paintings.

My pictures seem to compress space, so allowing the confrontation you suggest. Here, I am thinking of Degas’ sculpture, which made space modern by confronting heroic scale with its counterpoint. I think of myself as painting the counterpoint. It’s not an inverse, it’s not an opposite of what went before, it simply shows a different point of view, it shows a different way of seeing things for a different time. There are lots of ways.

Susan Roth. Lucille, 1983. Canvas, acrylic, 150 x 237.5 cm. Photo copyright and courtesy of the artist.

SC: Could you see your work from the early 80s onwards as coming out of, or responding to, a moment of doubt and perhaps even crisis in the project of postwar American modernist painting?

SR: When met with the end of an era, or when your inquiry challenges the prevailing climate, it is necessary to find a new “working space”.

Rather than being an American artist, I think of myself making world art, so I am free to find the stepping stones my art needs and feed my imagination from a wealth of sources. There are no rules in art: all approaches are acceptable.

You can paint as though nothing has happened or you can decide that something has happened and push on. I paint in the latter context. I am filled with radical hope, as shown by Chief Plenty Coups, the last traditional chief of the Crow nation, known for his wisdom during turbulent times. I remain committed to something new.

Susan Roth. Heart Murmuring, 1984. Canvas, acrylic, 170 x 271 cm. Photo copyright and courtesy of the artist.

SC: What is the principal attraction for you of the shaped canvas, of deviating from the four-square painting-image?

SR: I love all shapes! That sounds silly, I know! However, each picture has the seeds of its own solution: each picture accepts the responsibility of seeing its own boundaries, as with the geometric shaping of Noland. Like meaning, shape is not handed to you. Boundaries, in this case, are not a priori.

I found that the undulating, roiling, surface of my paintings helped find the picture’s edge. I use the word “roiling” to describe my surface because of its connection to the sea. When you see the waves on the sea, you have a sense not just of the surface, but of everything that exists beneath it.

And to be completely frank, the Eldridge Cleaver proverb resonates: “You either have to be a part of the solution, or you’re going to be part of the problem.” I am actively searching for a solution with each new work.

Susan Roth. White Rabbit, 2025. Synthetic stone, 73.5 x 51 x 33 cm. Photo copyright and courtesy of the artist.

SC: Sculpture has been a big part of your work in recent years. Steel and then more recently synthetic stone. I understand you have been thinking recently about Medardo Rosso. Can you say something about what attracts you to his work?

SR: I first saw Rosso in 1963 at the Museum of Modern Art [in New York]; my mother was a fan, so we went multiple times. He has loomed ghost-like around my interests. What captures me presently is scale: how can something that small feel so big?

Concierge (1883), I believe in MoMA’s collection, with its wax over plaster feels like painting. The turbulence of surface talks directly to my understanding of mass versus surface versus colour. Rosso found the means to condense infinite feeling into an object for us to perceive.

SC: The quality of an “object” as opposed to an image seems to speak to your recent works in synthetic stone, which certainly feel bigger than they really are. Does this object quality distinguish these synthetic stone works from your previous sculptures in steel?

SR: The quick answer is yes! This is a big question! Why does certain work have the particular qualities it does? To begin, I would say the material is inseparable from its language.

The temperament of synthetic stone, so close to paint, allows the pictorial to become object. Colour can be inherent; viscosity varied; the plane acknowledged. Weight can be felt as the shadows are not imitated. But perhaps you could say all of these things about my paintings as well! The synthetic stone is perhaps self-supporting painting.

While I feel like I am painting with the synthetic stone, as it is so direct, I know that as a material it talks to plaster work I have long admired: Degas, Rosso, Giacometti, Henry Moore, William Tucker.

Often, I advance by solving a problem. I wanted an alternate means to work outside at an artists’ workshop, and the stone allowed me to do this. But once I had solved this problem, I realised that the material opens a door to many things I have long admired, that I didn’t really have the chance to think about with canvas. The material comes first.

Susan Roth. Sand Castles, 1997. Canvas, acrylic, 46 x 38 cm. Photo copyright and courtesy of the artist.

SC: The heavily collaged and gel-encrusted relief-like surfaces of your paintings in the 80s led to some critics disputing whether they were “sculptural” or “pictorial”. You have said to me that your work remains “painting”, as it “addresses the wall”. I largely agree with this and with critic Karen Wilkin’s argument that the paintings’ illusions keep them within the realm of the pictorial. But I don’t think that tells the whole story, case closed. Instead, some of your paintings – I think especially some of those from the 90s – seem sculptural in an illusionistic, rather than literal way. Their density seems to evoke a kind of core, whose presence is greater than the literal material you have used, as if it somehow extended backwards through the surface of the picture, as well as extruding out from it. This interiority reminded me of Rodin’s line: “Never consider surface as anything but the extremity of a volume.” It also seems to be a connection to the physicality of the body.

SR: I feel sure you are correct. I have had clues along the way.

I remember standing before a picture of mine with a friend. Struggling to find language to express what she saw and felt, I watched two hands slowly move down her body, her hands striving to form what she grasped, in all senses of metaphor; like water running down the body in a shower, expressing freedom and boundary, though not as contradiction.

Across different mediums, the work is a multiformity: whether with the synthetic stone or variable ground of the canvas; all bowing to gravity, as everything does.

Bill O’Reilly [who showed Roth’s work in 1970s and 80s] once told me that when the gallery hung my work it was not unusual to catch someone backing up to the painting to touch it! We laughed and wondered if, like Rodin, certain picture parts would show wear!

Perhaps, maybe, the differences between painting and sculpture are more elusive than I understand.

SC: Yes, perhaps it is strange to think that genuinely new work – which I believe yours is – would easily fit into already established categories. As well as crossing, or at least blurring, boundaries between painting and sculpture, your work has a material promiscuity. You treat the traditional materials of paint and canvas in surprising ways and also are able to incorporate plastics, paper, sand and found objects, especially porcelain plates or bowls. Can you say something about the importance to you of materials?

SR: Art can be made by anybody at anytime, anywhere with anything. That’s the gospel! The precedent set by modernism is not lost on me. Standing before David Smith’s chicken-bone sculptures was revelatory. Revealing more than Picasso’s sculpture, as I look to render the material unified in the work. All those disparate parts together.

It is true I love crockery, bowls empty or full, plates the same … I know them well as the kitchen is another studio. These hand-me-downs come with their own history. The feeling is of moving time about (a facet of the collage method). I hope to do something akin to kintsugi, where the repair of the broken piece, in full view, embraces imperfections. In its resilience, there is a transformation of the work of art itself.

It is the search for new solutions to very old problems. As my palette grows, I hope to find new words to expand my language. I play no favourites … Though paint in all its myriad forms remains my true love.

Susan Roth. Back to Black, 2024. Black gessoed canvas, acrylic, archival paper, canvas, acrylic skin and accretions, 142.5 x 145 cm. Photo copyright and courtesy of the artist.

SC: One of the key aspects to any artist’s use of materials is how the material resists or enables what the artist wants to create. Does the artist impose on their materials or do they, as it were, go with the flow. Many of your paintings seem to stage this dialogue, but it also seems very relevant to your recent sculptures. I’m thinking especially of your interest in scholars’ rocks, perhaps the ultimate example of a material allowed to shape itself. Do you see a distinction between painting and sculpture in this way?

SR: My experience indicates that my attitude remains the same, whatever I do.

Materials’ characteristics affect our understanding of a work of art. New materials bring a new relationship to the present, where anything is possible. The basic trust needed to work with new advances is a trust in reality, overcoming nihilism and trusting individuality, subjectivity and spontaneity. Meaning is always a surprise.

I use my materials not looking for mastery, rather for expression. Various artists have looked to elevate plaster, which is often used as a means to a more durable material, like bronze. Synthetic stone addresses plaster’s fragility, porousness, and need for armature. I investigated the possibilities of synthetic stone with Mark Golden, following memories of sandcasting on the beach with my father. Once we settled on few formulas, I gave the material the lead. I neither work one way nor the other; like walking, easier on two legs! No doubt that internal dialogue is evident.

I believe in Arthur C Clarke’s law: the only way to discover the limits of the possible, is venture a little past to the impossible!

Susan Roth. Cleopatra's Needle, 2006. Synthetic stone, 76 x 33 x 26.5 cm. Photo copyright and courtesy of the artist.