Catalogue essay by Bill Berkson from “Nocturnes” an exhibition

Jan Holloway Gallery San Francisco, California May 1997

Susan Hall’s new paintings are done in oil on canvas wrapped around small birch panels, with approximately in ch-wide strips reserved around the perimeters. Each strip is given a pastel coating that may recall the sweet-nothing sauce of a Necco Wafer. Hall intends this framing device to prompt in the viewer a sensation of “crossing a border to look into a painting, its depth.” And depth is there, with Hall’s customary implicitness, though more urgently tendered than in earlier pictures. “Landscape is deepening for me and opening into another dimension. T he pictures are about space, time and night.”

Hall’s attentions to landscape now range more widely than before. As ever, there are the views from along the Point Reyes peninsula, where she grew up and where she has reestablished full-time residence after years of shuttling seasonally to and from New York. Then there are vistas of the American southwest-most prominently, the City of Rocks near the interstate east of Silver City, New Mexico newly familiar along Halls’ route to annual visits to Texas. In both the approach is head-on; what jogs emotion here is sudden unfamiliar –seeming light, which may in actuality be as plain as one sample title has it; Moon on the Dune. Likewise, Tree in Shadow is just that, a backlit willow perhaps, but the slightly cropped dome of verdue suggests some glowering colossus hunched near a creek bed.

Such is Hall’s vision - an alertness to the sublime facets available at any turn

– that its scope can be registered perfectly and to the point in these energy-packed little pictures.

Bill Berkson San Francisco, California March 1997