Susan Thornbury

The Way it Was by Susan Thornbury, Contemporary Artwork on Panel

2025

'Somewhere In Between' by Susan Thornbury is a striking abstract work rendered in mixed media on panel. Measuring 36 x 36 in, this piece showcases the artist's distinctive style and command of composition. A perfect addition for collectors seeking contemporary strikings with presence and personality. Susan Thornbury creates richly layered mixed media paintings that feel both modern and timeless. Working on wood panels with plaster and wax, she builds surfaces that are as much about what’s revealed as what’s concealed. Her compositions often begin with structure—repeating motifs inspired by antique textiles, vintage wallpaper, or family heirlooms—then soften and evolve through an intuitive, hands-on process of scraping, sanding, and waxing. The result is work that feels quiet but deeply tactile, inviting viewers to linger and discover the nuance within every petal, line, and edge. A background in graphic design shapes Susan’s sensibility: there’s a balance between pattern and spontaneity, symmetry and imperfection. Whether working in soft sage greens, misty grays, or whispery whites, she leans into the beauty of restraint, letting texture and subtle shifts in color carry the emotion. Susan lives and works in Atlanta, where she shares a home with her husband, two daughters, and their spunky rat terrier...

"You're Invited" by Amy Dixon – Interior Scene with Ornate Mirror, Mixed Media on Canvas, 12x9 in You're Invited by Amy Dixon is a 12x9 inch mixed media painting that captures the qu...

Jessica Houston’s most recent works look north. What is north? Where is it? Is it a fixed place, or something else? Her second solo show at Art Mûr brings together paintings, a sound sculpture, and chine collé prints, all of which reveal a fragile, fluid, and often fractured, north. An iron ore stone becomes a speaker, playing recordings of interviews and singing, and expanding the physical presence of the stone. The exaggerated textures of the paintings give them, too, a sculptural and documentary feel. They record how actions—breaking and piercing, pushing and pulling—disrupt and transform the paintings’ surfaces. By resembling patterns one finds in the wild—scratches across the surface of a rock, uneven waves that form on melting snow—they unhinge any clear distinction between what is natural and what is made. Made with a printmaking technique that binds together distinct papers, the chine collé prints begin with photographs Houston took of Baffin Island. She then combines the images with coloured paper, creating traces of the process of extracting and replacing parts of a scene, and an equal awareness of both what is present and absent. Some are composed of double circles, like looking through binoculars. In Business As Usual, a decaying interior—peeling wallpaper, a rusted stove—is juxtaposed with the soft glow of a yellow circle. This continues Houston’s ongoing use of colour to question the particulars of perception. Heritage of All, White with Greed and Iron, and The Spaces we Breath, Houston’s titles read like lines of a haiku. Composed as prose, they are also confrontational, mapping out the cultural and environmental impacts of the extraction of resources in the Arctic. We witness scenes of violent decay, and yet simply carry on, like Business As Usual. In What Nations Come and Go a pale purple oval nearly fills the frame, revealing only in the very far right a simple cabin in front of a rocky incline. A similar imposing cloud of colour, this time blue, dominates the landscape in Mapped, Claimed, and Evaluated. The north is just as much an idea as it is a place, and is one that looms large in the Canadian imagination. There are few better examples than Glenn Gould...

Leslie Wilkes’ paintings on canvas and gouaches on paper are an explosion of shape and color. With near perfect symmetry, the colors of these works exhibit an opaque, smooth surface...