Susan Fenton: Hand Colored Photographs

Creating art is a long term process, a thought behind the visual and chaos-order an artist work out around the concept. Susan Fenton’s work as she used to describe depend very much on order she set herself. Giving the importance to a perfect balance and the idea of “beautiful” Susan was a mastermind in creating remarkable fine art photography series. Whether the concepts were still life or portraits, the key element for Susan’s work was the perfect ambient and manipulated order to achieve the final composition. Either these concepts are heavily environment-dependent by an abstract approach grounded in metaphors, introspection and emotion. 

Using hand-coloring, a technique of manually adding colors to a black and white photograph, the value of luminosity and intensity appears to be a function component that gives much stronger emotional effect, exceeding the monotony of a common b&w visual context. With everything taken into account, facing with Susan’s work for the first time I was quite in a shock by the way she managed to attain a flat color feel, and yet its far from the dullness sometimes a flat color art articulates. I’m not a huge fan of contrast in art and more likely I will be attracted to a matte color finish. But looking at Susan’s work I am unable to stop myself from reconsidering an indifference feel I have for non-minimal color use. So far it appears Susan’s art can reach both and its something I got sucked into it right away.

Excerpt from the North Dakota Museum of Art:

“From 1991 through 1994 Fenton taught in Japan. While living there Fenton assembled a series of visual metaphors that address the quiet strength of the Japanese people, as well as the fetishistic and ritualistic iconography of their culture, both traditional and contemporary. In her photographs, Fenton assembled visual metaphors that she hoped will address the quiet strength of the Japanese people as well as the fetishistic and ritualistic iconography of their culture, both traditional and contemporary. Fenton's images involve a shallow and tightly composed space with solitary models who remained anonymous. Appropriated headgear, body treatment or props were her own creations, made solely for the sake of the photograph with primary concern for composition and esthetic impact. Fenton's photographs were printed on fiber-based paper. They are then brown-toned and finally hand-painted with photographic oil pigments.”

author Ivan Bjørn

Book cover designer and contemporary visual artist. Over 500 publications, prints, book covers and artworks worldwide. www.nadavisual.com