Retrospective: Fran Sutherland
Retrospective
Fran Sutherland
Showing in the Front Gallery
Opening Reception May 2 @ 3pm
Exhibition May 2 – 31, 2026
ASK Gallery Hours: Fri – Sun, Noon – 5pm
From the oil paintings created in 1958 at SUNY New Paltz until the mixed media art works of 2025, this retrospective features the landscape and bridges of the Hudson Valley inspired by abstract representations of native American (Lenape) sacred stories.
Fran Sutherland, a native New Yorker, is a painter, teacher and restorer of historic homes. Strongly influenced by Eastern aesthetics, Fran’s creative paintings synthesize both Eastern and Western formats in multi-media works. The chosen media and techniques express personal ideas, which is especially evident in her textural compositions emphasizing oil and acrylic resist techniques.
About the artist
Fran Sutherland, a native New Yorker, is a painter, teacher, and restorer of historic homes. Strongly influenced by Eastern aesthetics, Fran’s creative paintings synthesize both Eastern and Western formats in multi-media works. The chosen media and techniques express personal ideas, which is especially evident in her textural compositions emphasizing oil and acrylic resist techniques. Fran’s most recent and unique works reflect the geophysical world, which we all experience in different ways. For this artist, walking, hiking, and motorless boating are meditative and energizing at the same time. To begin looking out or forward is the way Fran Sutherland psychologically and physically approaches the day and life. The Meditative Series depict the top piece that shows an Asian-styled, vertical composition, and the second bottom piece that recognizes what is at one’s feet and depicts the subject in a Western, rectangular format. The two paintings are then presented and suspended as one work of art. This new series of paintings explores and attempts to share the act of looking forward and where one is at the moment, or what is below as well as ahead.
Many of her works, including The Bridge Series, integrate geologic coloration and the play of light and water with local and international sites and architectural structures. Sutherland’s semi-autobiographical paintings continue to be inspired by New York’s Hudson Valley and Arizona’s Santa Rita Mountains.