Susan Landesmann
Artist Statement

My work emerges from a lifetime spent thinking in shape, color, and structure. Trained as a graphic designer at Parsons in New York and later building an award-winning career in Los Angeles, I developed a visual language rooted in precision, balance, and intentionality. For years, my artistic practice centered on abstraction—geometric forms, saturated color, and the interplay of line and space. These early explorations laid the foundation for a shift that has become central to my current work: bringing the human figure, specifically the female body, into dialogue with that abstract vocabulary.

My paintings begin with color and composition, but they move into the deeper terrain of womanhood, aging, memory, and the quiet emotional landscapes that accompany them. I am drawn to the tensions inherent in growing older: the loneliness that can arise, but also the profound sense of freedom, self-possession, and interior richness that time makes possible. The women in my paintings often exist in contemplative or symbolic spaces—part architecture, part dreamscape—where form becomes a vessel for emotional truth rather than literal representation.

Alongside acrylic on canvas, I work in mixed media, incorporating found fabric, handmade paper, and fragments of texture into my compositions. These materials carry their own histories—worn edges, fibers, and patterns that echo the lived experience of the body. In pieces like my geometric lavender collage, these elements become structural and poetic, grounding abstraction in something tactile and familiar.

Across both my figurative and abstract works, I aim to create images that feel at once intimate and expansive. Each piece is an invitation into a particular emotional world: quiet, searching, resilient, and deeply connected to the evolving story of what it means to inhabit a female body over time.

susanlandesmann.com