My oil paintings reflect the creative responses to how I see and feel. If there is a common denominator in my work, it is the conceptual interpretation of quietude and beauty influenced by the earthly rhythm of my immediate surroundings where I live and work in rural Vermont. I paint with imaginative expression, pleased that others may share an appreciation of similar ideas that are important to my work—tranquility, splendor, and simplicity.
—Glenn Suokko
Glenn Suokko’s paintings in oil reflect his explorations in creative process to further personal artistic development in still-life, landscape, and abstract works that are inspired by the natural environment where he lives and works in rural Vermont.
Born and raised in the United States in a small town in Massachusetts where he developed an interest in art at an early age, Suokko studied art and design, graduating from the Massachusetts College of Art (BFA) in Boston, Massachusetts in 1982, and the Cranbrook Academy of Art (MFA) in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in 1988.
As senior graphic designer at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from 1988 to 1991, Suokko was responsible for overseeing a wide range of publication, design, and exhibition projects, including the landmark exhibition Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History. He moved to Vermont and established a creative studio to work independently, focusing on publications for art museums such as the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Harvard University Art Museums in Cambridge, MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and Detroit Institute of Arts in Detroit; for art book publishers such as Hatje Cantz in Berlin, and Rizzoli International Publications in New York; and for art foundations such as the Li Ching Cultural and Educational Foundation in Taipei.
Over the last three decades, while working professionally in the art world, as a parallel career he developed his own work as a visual artist. Early on, he showed and offered his work and the work of other artists through annual innovative installations he and his wife Ann created in historic or abandoned buildings around the State of Vermont and invited friends to the exhibitions at the unique settings. This started a steady rhythm of artmaking, showing, sales, and growing a receptive audience.
Working professionally for many years in the discipline of two-dimensional design, Suokko developed a keen understanding of legibility, the page or picture plane, simplicity, and meaning that, as a result, similarly stimulated his work as a painter. His paintings are situated at the crossroads of imagery in still life, landscape, and non-figuration. His relationship to painting traditions and his knowledge of its history are unified with subjective innovations, allowing him the space to create works that reference the intersections of art and design, history and memory, precision and imperfection, representation and abstraction, and control and spontaneity.
Suokko is a painter working by tradition in oil. Process and materials are important to him. He builds his own stretchers and prepares surfaces to his desired standards before the work of painting an image commences. He prefers a neutral pallete and handmade paints made from natural pigments. He focuses on themes in different genres. Suokko’s approach to still life painting has taken many turns, from his earliest realistic renderings, to subdued monochromatic compositions, to quick painterly suggestions, to recent bold abstract expressions. Of late, the boundaries between tradition and abstraction are freely pushed as a way of rethinking what generally accepted requirements make a still life painting. His landscape paintings are inspired by the land, trees, hillside meadows, and ridges at his home to convey the simplicity and rustic beauty of the countryside, elements that over decades have matured from representational imagery to imagined forms and expressive gestures. In his nonrepresentational work, his ongoing “Forest Variations” and “Wildflower” series reference his outdoor observations from his daily walks in the woods, then conveying those visual experiences as visually abstracted, formal expressions.
Silence and beauty are important to him. His oeuvre stimulates a re-evaluation of fullness (past, present, and future) and emptiness (mystery, silence beyond words)—the life behind a practice that balances illusion and thought on a two-dimensional surface—embodying a creative language that comes from within the soul, a personal way of feeling and imagining innate qualities of quietude and beauty through painting.
Having briefly embraced the convention of gallery representation, Suokko’s independent, entrepreneurial spirit guided him in 2008 to open his own gallery in Vermont where today he offers visitors a calm, un-pressured space to see his art and design work displayed in elegant installations he creates throughout the year. Suokko’s work resides in private residences in many cities across the United States, and in Europe, Asia, and Australia.
