Susan Manspeizer is a painter and sculptor who has been making art for more than five

decades. Like so many others at this juncture, she is deeply troubled by the despoliation of the

environment and what it means for the future, as well as by what seems to be the daily barrage

of other catastrophic events. One result of that concern has been her increasingly inventive use

of repurposed materials as one way to cut back on rampant consumerism. But long before the

current crises, she used “found metals and wooden objects” in her work because they intrigued

her as objects and she wanted to raise them, she said, to a “higher level of artistic beauty,”

striving to “to make the world better, through art.”

A materialist who employs a range of mediums such as wood and paper, Manspeizer has long

been fascinated by color, line, texture, and shape, reveling also in the sensuousness of oil,

pastel, ink, charcoal, and other mediums of her métier. While she does not intend to conceal

what her materials are, they are inevitably altered in her treatment of them, as part of her

process. For instance, in a kind of trompe l’oeil, thin sheets of wood, a favorite material, often

assume the silken suppleness and sheen of fabric through painted color and its light.

Acutely sensitive to the beauty of line and color, Manspeizer incorporates both in her work

deftly, with great finesse. Her production is also known for the fluidity and animation of its

shapes and like any artist, she is always searching for new resolutions. Her approach is additive,

not subtractive, typically building her works up from small units into larger works constructed

from multiple parts. In her recent series, “Lines in Space,” she focused on repurposing,

fashioning a lyrical sequence of organic works based on nature that in its rhythms and poses

has the lissome grace of flowers. It was a departure in some ways but also a natural evolution

since at the heart of her work, there is always nature and its infinite forms. Although stemming

from a linear impulse, her lines are not straight, nor are they often straight in nature.

During the pandemic (which finally seems to be ebbing, at least in its rates of mortality),

Manspeizer, like most of us, was forced to re-assess all that we had taken for granted, startled

into new directions, new beliefs, new ways of doing things. Among her recent projects have

been drawings in pen and ink that are imagined portrayals reflecting the suffering of so many

during the past few years. But it was repurposing that became her mantra.

She discovered paper facemasks, her newest material. As the most ubiquitous—not to mention

fraught—emblems of this historic moment, they were an obvious choice. But even before that,

when she started to consider repurposing and recycling as part of her process, she turned to

earlier paintings on paper that she no longer wanted to keep and began to cut them up into

fine strips. They became the basis for new works. Reanimating and reconfiguring older works,

her gesture was both pragmatic and conceptual as time past met time present in a new

context. It became a way to proceed forward. To the shredded paintings, she added facemasks

that she cut up into equally delicate strips, assembling the two into an imagined species of

extravagant florals flickered with color that seem on the verge of whirling away, her emphasis,

as usual, on the curvilinear, the feminine, and the biomorphic, the original materials no longer

recognizable.

Manspeizer searches for such transformative moments, when commonplace materials, in the

hands of an artist, become transfigured, alchemized, its utilitarianism swapped for something

far more ineffable. She is also looking for ways to address and make some sense of these

unprecedented several years, shaping them into works that are beautiful and meaningful,

buoyed by the pulse of life.

Lilly Wei