Pride of Place

But as she points out, about a year ago, before she painted any of the works in Felix & Felix, she profoundly changed her painting technique. "I had always seen myself as being primarily into drawing, so all my paintings started out as drawings. I felt that I'd fail if I didn't have a drawing in front of me," Sushe explains. "But I needed a change. I was studying the abstract expressionists and thought that their direct approach seemed freeing, and I tried it. I let the paint direct me. It was intuitive. Every one of these paintings started out as a group of simple abstracts, both geometric and organic, painted directly on the board."

Most of Sushe's latest paintings are in the form of abstractions of trees. In "Rising Moon," a grove of bare trees stands out against a stylized night sky. Sushe has crowded the oil-on-board painting with contradictions. She uses hard lines and softly blended edges; she sets dark earth tones against bright colors and mixes organic shapes with geometric ones. The same juxtapositions are seen throughout Sushe's portion of the exhibit.

In addition to being a painter, Sushe is an accomplished ceramic sculptor; a half dozen of her painted terra cotta nudes supplement her more than thirty paintings and drawings in the show.

Felix & Felix provides in-depth coverage of two of the state's most accomplished artists. But hurry: It closes Sunday.

New Work by Felix & Felix, through May 30 at the William Havu Gallery, 1040 Cherokee Street, 303-893-2360.