biographical information

Susan  Gorsen is an artist from Louisville, Kentucky who has been exhibiting vividly colored abstract drawings for nearly 3 decades. She has been described as “a person in love with color”. Her work is in numerous public, private and corporate collections throughout America, including Subaru Corp, Blue Cross of PA. Glaxo Smith Kline, Atlanta Kaiser Permanente, Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, Jewish Hospital Heart and Lung Center, National City Bank, Brown-Forman Corp, Louisville Gas & Electric Co., and U of Kentucky Medical Associates. Working mainly with oil pastel crayons, she has had 16 solo shows in the United States, as well as international group exhibitions in Germany, Ecuador, Ireland and Northern Ireland. The GreenGrass/Bluegrass/NewGrass exhibition with Maura O’Rourke at Ardgillan Castle in July-August 1999 introduced Ms. Gorsen’s work to an Irish audience. This exhibition developed as part of a cultural exchange Ms. Gorsen founded for mid-career visual artists from Ireland and Kentucky, the realization of a dream inspired by her first visit to Ireland in 1968.

Ms. Gorsen is a longtime arts activist, serving for more than a decade on the Louisville Mayor’s Committee for Public Art and Amenities, as well as the Executive Board of the Louisville Visual Art Association. Earlier in her career, while living in Philadelphia, she was a creative consultant for interiors and fine art in addition to being a columnist, arts writer and critic for the respected monthly publication ARTMATTERS.  She has also studied and lectured on the psychology of color and its impact on health, well being and mental productivity. Ms. Gorsen worked as an Artist in Residence with the Louisville public school system designing visual arts programs that address the special needs of children at risk, as well as programming specific lessons that use art projects to teach core academic subjects. Ms. Gorsen also gives creativity workshops for educational administrators, teachers and corporate executives. She runs special programs that aim to combat teen violence and poor self-esteem through collaborative art projects which often involve young people initiating or aiding in the creation of her own work.

After a successful 1999 summer workshop, she brought her youth arts program back to Belfast, Northern Ireland for 3 weeks in 2000 as an Artist in Residence for the Castlereagh Borough Council working in municipal community centers with children on both sides of the political conflict there. Ms. Gorsen returned to Belfast in July 2001 to collaborate with local artists Ian Fleming and Deirdre Robb on an environmental sculpture project funded by a United Kingdom/Northern Irish Arts Council Millennium Year of the Artist Grant. In April 2002, she coordinated Spring Grasses, a weeklong collaboration involving a dozen Irish and local artists working in Louisville with talented teens in an open studio format. This was followed in July of that year by a similar project, Links that Connect Us, created at Castlereagh College and exhibited at Belfast’s Waterfront Hall. Spring Grasses II in May 2005 brought together 15 artists for a 12 day retreat at Mount Saint Francis in Southern Indiana which produced DOUBLRSPEAK, the politically themed exhibition about English/American language and cultural differences.  

Ms. Gorsen’s most recent solo exhibition Irish Postcards in January 2005 marked a significant stylistic and thematic departure for the artist. This  romantic body of work consists of hand colored digitally enlarged oil pastel drawings of her own photographs taken during numerous trips to Ireland. Color itself remains the common thread linking this precision realism with her more familiar abstract drawings.

By 2004 degenerative osteo-arthritis in both shoulders had made it impossible for Ms. Gorsen to continue her quarter century studio practice. After having bi-lateral shoulder replacement surgeries in 2007 she slowly returned to the studio determined to resume both her abstract colorfield work as well as continuing with the Irish Postcards series. As of April 2009 she was back working fulltime in her studio. Her next exhibition, opening late October 2010, will be at the Carnegie Center for Art and History in New Albany, IN.

The theme for this solo exhibition is a rising phoenix. The show will feature older work  from her long career as well as numerous new pieces.

Ultimately the painterly oil pastel drawings themselves provide the best insight for Susan Gorsen the person. They are large deceptively complex poetic compositions, dominated by deep jewel tones and a rainbow of colors fused together in a distinctive textured style, punctuated by broad sweeping calligraphic gestures and subtle wispy markings that form a visual language uniquely her own. The drawings resemble music portrayed with colors instead of sound, a series of endlessly varying improvisations which share a visual identity of color relationships, mysterious personal imagery and a kinship of spirit. The work adheres to the credo written on the wall in Ms. Gorsen’s studio - be a catalyst for optimism.