Join us Saturday, July 11th from 2pm to 3pm for an Artist Conversation with Susan Christian and friends, a relaxed afternoon discussion in the gallery surrounding the current exhibition Slow Work. FREE to attend Childhood’s End Gallery 222 4th Ave W Olympia, WA 98501 childhoods-end-gallery.com info@childhoods-end-gallery.com *Seating is limited
Susan Christian has lived in Olympia for 54 years and she has been central to the arts community here. Irritated that there were few places for artists to show art, in 2011 she started Salon Refu Gallery downtown. There she showed many local artists, held poetry readings, book readings, and artist talks. It was a joyous hub of the local arts community. Speaking of her own work, Christian says she very intentionally doesn’t paint pictures of things, nor suggestions of things either. She describes her work as someone “touching the surface.” She points out that art needs to be visible and, not one for complacency, she was “not going to let people go to sleep.”
Slow Work is an excellent art exhibition featuring paintings on wooden lathe with a sea full of blue by Susan Christian and bonfire fired pottery by Steve Belz at Childhood’s End Gallery in Olympia — thought provoking, deceptively simple and beautiful art. This is a must-see exhibition through July 26.
ART REVIEW by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS Susan Christian returns to Salon Refu (now the studio of artist Lucy Gentry and renamed LGM Studios) with an exhibition of new paintings and constructions called Take a Break. In Christian’s most recent previous exhibition, she showed a group of long, thin paintings that were all about …
VISUAL ARTS REVIEW by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS Susan Christian’s paintings at Stable Studios are the real deal. They are painting as painting is meant to be: simple, straight forward, unpretentious and with no trickery whatsoever. Some might see the cut-off figures, oddly elongated formats and mysterious scenes as gimmickry, but they’re not; they …
by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS Stable Studios is tucked away in an easy-to-overlook building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Cherry Street in downtown Olympia. The artist it’ll feature for Arts Walk this fall is anything but little-known. She’s Susan Christian, former owner of Salon Refu and a painter who’s been showing her work …
by Christina Butcher for OLY ARTS Many Olympians know Susan Christian as the former owner of gallery Salon Refu, rather than as a lifelong artist and painter. But truth be told, Christian has been painting for 57 years and creating art, rather than curating or managing it, is her true passion. After closing the doors …
by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS One might think, if one pored through painter and gallery owner Susan Christian’s biography, that she’s the kind of creative being one might expect to have seen hanging out with Picasso and Hemingway at Gertrude Stein’s salons at the beginning of the 20th century, or later at gatherings of …
VISUAL ARTS REVIEW by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS Once again Susan Christian is showing her painted stick constructions at her own gallery, Salon Refu. The paintings are assemblages of various kinds of sticks, mostly lathe, which she puts together in rectangular shapes and paints as if they were stretched canvases. The last time I …
There’s been lots of buzz around Susan Christian’s participation as curator of South Puget Sound Community College’s 2024 Southwest Regional Juried Exhibition which runs July 8-Aug. 16. The show includes 39 works by 32 artists from Southwest Washington. Awards will be presented along with a gallery talk by Christian at the opening reception on Thursday, July 11.