Member Profile: Susanna Briselli

Artist’s Statement
Though trained as a painter, I became interested in photography by accident. Many years ago, I was living abroad with my husband and new baby , painting, and taking copious photographs of my new environment. One afternoon while working on a large canvas, I mixed a co...
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Though trained as a painter, I became interested in photography by accident. Many years ago, I was living abroad with my husband and new baby , painting, and taking copious photographs of my new environment. One afternoon while working on a large canvas, I mixed a color that simply wouldn't work on the canvas the way I intended. It was a great color and there was a lot of it on the palette. In frustration, I turned to a pile of snapshots scattered on a table next to the easel. With brush loaded and nowhere to go, I put the paint on the photograph and the result astounded me. In a few months, I had a whole collection of little painted photographs. On a visit back to New york, I took my 'portfolio' to a curator of painting at the Museum of Modern Art. She expressed concern was that the work was neither painting nor photography and therefore too difficult to classify. The year was 1973 and the concept of mixing these two mediums was still odd. Undaunted, I studied the art and technique of making photographs in order to maximize my control of the medium and have continued to combine these mediums over many years. This is my signature approach to image making.