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In Salisbury, a Barn's Tale articleIn Salisbury, a Barn’s Tale

RAND HOLDS FIRST ONE-WOMAN SHOW

Written and Photographed by KATHRYN BOUGHTON

When is good not good enough? Susan Rand of Salisbury thinks she has found that answer—at least in her painting. Ms. Rand, who opens a new solo show this weekend at the Norfolk Library, has a new body of work that she feels takes her works “a step farther.”

“I feel like I’ve looked deeper into myself,” she said. “When I am painting [this series] things come out that I didn’t know were there.”

It is an opinion shared by her artistic cohorts. She tells of sending a card to a former mentor. The card bore one of her new images. “He called and asked, “Susan, when did you start to paint like that?”’ she reported with satisfaction.

The Litchfield County Time

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article: A Meeting of Paint and Photograph

A Meeting of Paint and Photograph

RAND HOLDS FIRST ONE-WOMAN SHOW

Written by ANNE DAY
Photographed by JUDITH PETROVICH

She says she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop, everything is going so well for Susan Skakel Rand of Salisbury. The impossibly young-looking Ms. Rand, a top seller for Elyse Harney Real Estate, has just hung her first one-woman show of “Painterly Photographs” at the Norfolk Library. Mother of three, real-estate executive and artist, Ms. Rand seems to be fulfilling all of her life’s dreams at once.

Ms. Rand chose the title for the show because the work is both photography and painting. The images some pictures of the leisure class enjoy in their leisure and some landscapes, is at once facile and complex. The postcard for the show is a triptych of young people on the beach. At first glance it is one painting, at second, it might have once been a photograph and at third, one notices the seams where the three pictures have merged. Not much is happening with the subjects, they stand posed for the camera-the movement is in the artist’s touch.

The Litchfield County Times

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Opening up the Dark Places articleOpening up the Dark Places

The Art Scene: JUDITH LINSCOTT

Susan Rand’s work at the Norfolk Library shows a leap in her proression. While she painted some very painterly and moving pieces in the past, those (at least those she has chosen to show) were in the primarily safe category. They were good.

The pieces on display at Norfolk show an artist who is working less at creating a painting and more at the painting itself, exploring in a newly intense and confident way. Thus, a series of works examines the blackness of an open barn door surrounded by the green of the barn and the grass, or looks through the door into the interior of the barn; these aren’t about what is depicted as much as an exploration of form and color, of the complement of dark and light, the endless possiblilities of perspective and how it informs what we see. It’s about entrances and exits, the light we allow in and what we keep out.

Compass

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