A Change of Scenery, a Diversion From Water Paintings

Artist Susan Clover couldn’t just ignore what she was seeing around her. There at her Indian Wells condo, just north of Indio, Clover was surrounded by a sea of colorful wildflowers, spawned by the year’s desert rainfall.

All the dramatic reds, blues, greens, yellows and other bright colors might have been an obvious enough subject for some artists. But Clover has spent most of the past 20 years painting scenes at the beach, at lakeside and at poolside, with rarely a flower or any other plant life in sight.

She’d found an expressive setting in these bodies of water, and yet, “I had to paint these flowers,” Clover says. “I’ll probably go back to painting the ocean and all that. But I was just so inspired by the acres and acres of flowers.”

An exhibition of 15 new paintings by Clover begins today at the Orlando Gallery in Sherman Oaks, where she has shown her work every June for the past two decades. And like most of Clover’s work, the natural setting acts as an often epic backdrop to the quiet people in the foreground.

From a certain distance, says gallery co-owner Robert Gino, the new paintings appear to have a smooth hyper-realism, but close up, the flowers and other details offer a more expressive style. “It’s wonderful that she can keep that illusionistic quality,” Gino says. “She has the old style of painting, but she’s very contemporary with it.”

He added: “I was kind of pleased when she brought these into the gallery. An artist has to move on. In the process of doing so, her palette changes, her color changes.”

On one large canvas, titled “Monica,” a young woman in a long blue dress reclines peacefully among the flowers, their shadows cast delicately across her face. In another series of seven paintings, women in medieval dress interact as the white and pink of their gowns gradually blend into the plant life.

As with almost all her work, Clover uses family and friends as models in the new paintings. Several are of her adult daughter, India. Another shows her son’s wife and new baby.

“I feel I get more natural poses that way,” says Clover, who grew up in Los Angeles and now teaches painting at Irvine Valley College. “Professional models are overexposed because other artists use them. Also, I like the intimacy of people I know. They’re not professionals, so they strike poses that are awkward, but in a way appealing. They’re spontaneous.”

Inevitably then, Clover has visually documented the history of her family. She has been painting India, she says, since her daughter was 3. “They are there, my built-in models,” she says. “So I just painted them.”

Clover says she is now finishing a few more of these flower paintings, after which she plans to return to water as her favored setting. From her other home in Seal Beach, the artist usually travels to the ocean nearby or to the oasis of Palm Canyon to take the photographs from which she often creates her paintings.

“I’m going back to doing the water, but I just needed to get away from it for a while,” she says. “You get another perspective, another viewpoint that way.

“I’m a real intuitive painter. I don’t think that much. I’m sure doing these flower paintings will affect my other work, but I’m not sure in what way.”

An exhibition of paintings by Susan Clover opens today and continues through June 30 at the Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks. Admission is free. Call (818) 789-6012.