ART : Out of Death, a Celebration of Life

Several stories lie behind Wendy Sussman’s series of paintings at the University of Judaism’s Platt Gallery, and some are more obvious than others.

For example, it would be difficult to know, without being told, that many of the 12 oil paintings are a Kaddish--a prayer for parents; hers died about five years ago. But the Kaddish “begins with an exultation of God,” said Sussman, suggesting that although the paintings came out of her intense mourning, they represent an energetic celebration of her parents’ lives.

After their deaths, Sussman, an assistant professor of art at UC Berkeley, could not paint for a year. “When you paint, you’re alone, and it was too hard to be alone,” she said. She threw herself into teaching painting and drawing.

Then, for reasons unknown to her, she developed a keen awareness of some of her young son’s toys--a medieval catapult and castle, a puppet. She began to draw the catapult, and it “became a narrative,” she said. “I don’t know why.”

In the 7-by-14-foot oil painting, “Rebecca,” an abstract image of her mother’s face rests in the arm of a catapult. The immense background is a deep blue, the blue of the greater universe. This work was the first of a triptych of paintings, each 14 feet wide. Although she was not satisfied with the two other paintings, her intent had been for the viewer to enter the triptych and “take a trip in it,” she said. She gives viewers the opportunity to travel with figures through space in each painting on view.

In the smaller 1993 “Catapult,” her mother’s image seems to be orbiting the cosmos, separate from the catapult but near it. The white expanse of this composition, the first of the series in which she used white, began to represent “an ecstatic experience, something beautiful,” she said. “It became the end of the grief--something else.”

When gallery coordinator Judith Samuel first saw images of Sussman’s paintings, “I knew that there was a real transformation that would take place from looking at this work,” she said. “When there are figures, they seem to float and move into the ether. The recent work is really moving into an abstract realm.”

“Underneath all these paintings are all these formalistic concerns,” Sussman said. “Coming from a realistic background, I’m trying to break it, to see the negative space--to put the subject in this vast field. I love the figure, but I find myself being more and more involved in the field. I need the figure there to bounce off of.”

In the 12-foot-wide “Family Portrait (X-Ray),” she brings viewers back to the present. This 1994 portrait of herself, her son and husband presents the three figures standing separately--the son in the middle--with much white space between them. “I like the energy of the white, the breathing, the energy in the field,” Sussman said.

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Out of her focus on life, death and family has emerged her desire to question the role of the ground as traditionally secondary to the figure in a painting.

“My work . . . reverses the role of the ground to rivaling the figure and possibly holding the key to the subject,” she writes.

In her most recent pieces, two oil-on-linen images--both titled “Horse”--”the ground is energized to the point where you feel the horse going through it,” she said.

“Wendy Sussman: Paintings,” University of Judaism’s Platt Gallery, 15600 Mulholland Drive, Bel-Air. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Friday. Ends Aug. 23. Information: (310) 476-9777, Ext. 276.