Sauvage Acrylic Art

I've painted since the age of 13, inspired mostly by my mother's artistic creativity as a child. I then made a life-changing decision in high school to change my major subject from 'Typing' to 'Art', halfway through the 1st of 3 years. I cut my creative teeth on Seurat, Monet, Rembrandt and Constable. I was told to follow the rules of 'form' and 'symmetry'. She told me I was too rebellious to lear

n to create anything that would be ever be recognized as a valuable contribution to the art world. I felt restricted, and constrained. After high school, I then went rogue. I discovered and delved into the revolutionary, weird and wonderful worlds of Klimt, Chagall, and Dali. I delighted in the mesmerizing pull of their mad creations. I wanted to do what I wanted to do, just like they had and I brushed many hours of happy compositions away over the next 30 years, indulging my whims, my views, my way of putting paint on a canvas, the rest be damned. After all, Gustav, Marc and Salvador told me it was okay to be myself on this platform and I didn't have to apologize for that. Then, I discovered acrylic pouring. Since 2021, I've been chasing the wild and unrestrained nature of truly random abstract: you can plan it all you want, but what you get is always unexpected. It kicks my behind 8 times out of 10. It hits me in an emotional place I never felt with brushwork, which soothes and calms, whereas pouring is always like a hair-raising chase across open and uncharted territory. We wrestle as I try to wrangle it. It shakes me around like a predator subduing its prey, and then, finally, I get it...right. I produce something that pulls me into a mesmerizing detachment from the world around me, just getting lost in the flow of the fine details, hard to attain with a brush, yet blindingly faster and magically acute. I do, in fact, still love symmetry. My work must have a balance, within the happen-stance chaos, or I'm not appeased. A piece will most often be scrapped if I look at it and all it does is bother me, and not draw me in: if it's so haphazard that it just looks like I threw paint on a canvas and decided to call it 'art'. Achieving that balance of form and colors is the really difficult part, but I'm at a stage now where I've managed to harness the process enough to get it to work with me, rather than against me, or, just boringly get it under my control. I'm also starting to amass so many pieces of art that it's time I get some of it moved to new homes, to new 'handlers' who want something wild in their perspective from time to time. Therefore, I present to you: 'Sauvage', my new era of creativity, born from the classics, but allowed to run with freedom and a good deal of abandon, and no doubt, might cause dear old Rembrandt to turn over in his grave. :}

- Suzanne Harper-Thorpe