Like a Bird on a Wire
Erica Snow
courtesy of the artist
Amidst soft jazz harmonies and a pleased, smiling crowd, Sue Melikian Steinsieck’s recent exhibition at Broadway Gallery, "Bird on a Wire", featured a beautiful series of her latest melodic, pinctoral compositions. For these large, layered, mixed media drawings, Steinsieck drew her inspiration from nature. In many of the works one could perceive the motif of a delicate bird among the branches, flowers and shells that fill the rich compositions. Steinsieck paints fields of overlapping color; she scrapes the surfaces of her canvas with delicately fine lines. She uses an earthy color palette and brightens it with dazzling metallic details, thus creating an unusual dynamic between the highlights and the lowlights.
Steinsieck started this series in the summer of 2004: "The phrase ‘Bird on a Wire’ communicated my sense of living in a precarious situation. I’ve come to realize that a bird on a wire probably feels content; it may be resting or looking around, waiting for other birds to inevitably join her. After all, she can fly."
Born in England in 1951, Steinsieck attended the Rhode Island School of Design. Soon after graduating she moved to New York and in 1974 began her professional career as a vocalist for the Benny Goodman Orchestra. Together they’ve toured in the United States and Europe until the early 1980’s when Steinsieck moved to Naples and gave birth to her son, Marco. She soon returned to New York to raise him while earning her Teaching Certification from Columbia University. Steinsieck taught art for seven years at Mount Ida College, Tufts University and brought her perspective to early childhood education at Long Fellow Preschool. In 2001, she ended her teaching career to dedicate herself full time to personal creative endeavors.
The show marks new ground for Melikian as an artist: generating myriad images of nature’s fancy from a compositionally sound color palette, she draws the viewer into a phantasmagoria of flora and fauna.
