Robert Sussna, earned his degree of Architecture at Cornell University, leading to a career and many achievements and awards in Architecture, Interior Design, and painting. In turn, he taught others from these learned skills as Visiting Lecturer in Architecture at Columbia University, Graduate School of Education, as an Adjunct Professor of Interior and Environmental Design at The College of New Jersey, and as a Watercolor Instructor at the Community School of New Hope-Solebury. Since leaving his academic career, his watercolor paintings have been in over fifty juried shows and many solo shows throughout NJ, NY, and PA. Robert is an honored member of the Northeast Watercolor Societ, Philadelphia Watercolor Society, Garden State Watercolor Society, and New Jersey Watercolor Society.

Robert Sussna: Artist Profile

I paint to express my visual and emotional reactions to what I see. I want to communicate to others my pleasure in seeing the world around me, its lights and darks, colors, and forms, and I want to continue the work that I started 40 years ago in straight black and white photography to show how I feel about what I see, making it more understandable and expressive to myself and others. I now feel free to acknowledge my joy in recognizing color. My paintings celebrate the intense power of color to affect how we feel, and how we are enabled by color to act. The colors in my paintings are not the colors of the objects I see but are the colors that resonate internally in harmonious groups. I alter colors in my paintings until they work together in a way that I like, and this is entirely arbitrary and personal. It pleases me when others also enjoy my colors.

Watercolor, traditionally applied, entirely transparent, and carefully composed, is my chosen medium for it’s exquisite ability to utilize strong, rich colors or the palest most delicate washes that are almost not there. A few grains of ground minerals in a large pool of water on white paper can exhibit tremendous power and astonish your eye. I try to allow the wet paint to move and behave in its own natural way because it often surprises me with beautiful effects, and its too difficult to control anyway.

My paintings usually represent real things, though I hope that they are not realistic, rather loosely suggesting the subject they came from. I always want them to have an abstract watercolor way of taking something from the subject but becoming new.

My painting is a way of leaving the practical everyday world for another that is made with magical images, expressive of special thoughts and feelings, and takes you along with me to the one where the colors are free to shimmer and play.

Recently, I have begun to make paintings with multiple, strong shadows moving across the paper. These successive darks, and shadows, suggest a musical score, with notes to be read over time as your eye travels through the picture.

The following watercolors include works from Robert’s travels as well as local sceneries.