Susanna Bluhm is a queer landscape-based artist who makes semi-abstract paintings. Raised with her brother in a suburb of Los Angeles by a therapist mother and engineer father, her Mexican grandmother was the anchor of family culture and her gay artist uncle an early source of inspiration and affirmation. Lured by lush rainy redwoods and a 24hour-access painting studio, she earned her BA in Studio Art from Humboldt State University. After a break from school that featured retail jobs, guarding museum art, and heartbreak, she moved to the cornfields of Illinois for graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she earned her MFA in painting, heard tornado sirens, gained rich teaching experience and met her future wife.

After doing art residencies at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and at the Karl Hofer Gesellschaft in Berlin, she moved to Seattle where she was a member of SOIL artist-run gallery for five years, was the 2014 recipient of the Neddy Artist Award in Painting, and had a live human pulled out of her body (not in that order). She lives in Seattle with her wife and twelve-year-old son.

RED COUNTRY

After the election of Donald Trump by the electoral votes of "red" states, I felt like I didn’t know who or what my country was. Like many Americans on both sides, my feelings of animosity and incredulity were projected cleanly within state lines due to the artificial boundaries imposed by the electoral college. As a painter who paints places as a way to negotiate my sense of belonging in them, it felt natural to paint the parts of my country that felt foreign to me. While Donald Trump is president, I am visiting as many red states as I can and then making paintings about my experiences there. The resulting paintings are not portraits of red states. They are semi-abstract, landscape-based paintings that are about my experiences in red states. I am doing this project so as to not hate my country. It is working.

From January 2017 - January 2021, I am taking short trips to several red states each year. While there, I meet people, take pictures, write, and draw. Then I come back to my studio in Seattle and make a group of paintings based on my experiences. In each state I visit, I am asking people who live there where they think I should go in their state.

I ask them to choose places that they think are important in some way - which I have left open to their interpretation and have included such places as the Grand Canyon, a haunted restaurant, the projects where they live, and city parks. When I go to the places people tell me to go, I'm thinking about those people and their stories. I'm also having my own experience in the place. All make their way into the paintings, sometimes in an abstract, minimal way, sometimes in a more recognizable way. I’m also keeping trip diaries for each state I visit, which are accessible on my website.

My goal for the paintings is for them to communicate something (however odd or abstract) about the place they represent, so that the person experiencing the painting ends up feeling licked by the place and by painting.

I am reading Moby-Dick while I do this project. Part of the title of each painting (the part in parentheses) is a chapter title in Moby-Dick. I am on a journey of intimacy with our country. I must be stalwart as I pursue my whale so as not to be slain in the process.

Daimler, Berlin, Germany

The City of Seattle

Swedish Medical Center

Capitol One

The Allen Institute

Microsoft Corporation

Seattle University