Realist Mother

The beautiful people in Susan Clover’s photorealist paintings at Orlando Gallery in Sherman Oaks, aren’t GQ models: They’re her children and her children’s friends.

As a painter of youngsters in sun-speckled pools, Clover may seem the doyenne of middle-class prosperity, but there’s a home-ground impulse behind her lush, often sensual work.

“My art is sort of an autobiography because I’ve always used my kids, events from my life as subjects. When my children were younger, I used them as models for these moody fantasy paintings. I’d paint my daughter holding candles under moonlight. Then I got attracted to the patterns, colors and faces at carnivals, so we started hauling the kids to carnivals so I’d have food for thought.”

How does she get everybody to sit still? Clover doesn’t paint from life directly. When she gets an idea for a composition, she has the subjects pose approximately in the positions she wants, and then she photographs each component part.

“The eventual painting is not strictly observation, but a composite invention I come up with from all the photos,” she says. Referring to a huge juicy oil now on view in her show, she said, “I saw the kids in the pool. I was drawn to the way the sun reflected on their wet skin and over the water. I took snapshots of everyone and came up with that group scene.”

If this sounds like a paint-by-number formula, forget it. Clover is a student of anatomy and says that when she “gets stuck,” she makes detailed drawings of skeletons and musculature to understand how the body moves in space. She’s been a serious painter since a scholarship took her to study at the Center for Creative Studies in Baltimore in the early ‘60s.

What does she do when she’s not teaching art or making her shimmery slices of the California good life?

“Well, we all make art in my family,” Clover said. “My daughter’s studying painting at Long Beach State and my husband is an art director. So we grab some watercolors and brushes and we dash off to the beach to paint the last bits of sunset and then we have a picnic.”