“Suzanne Arbanas’ most ambitious subject matter is portraiture, true to the specific and the narrated, but with the significance of an emotional experience as a test of moral and artistic values. Her artistic interpretation is both traditional and yet new, which is equally true of the sensitivity and empathy of her reaction to her sitters. Her style is crystal clear, comprehensible and energetic, pictorially concentrated, without the seductiveness of color and gesture.”
Born in 1962 in Oakland, California, Arbanas spends her painting life between Michigan and Sarajevo along with repeated visits to Croatian islands for seascape studies.
Like her plein air works on the seaside, her portraits are also solely from the models sitting with her.
She credits much of her learning to the tutelage of Harvey Dinnerstein and Ronald Sherr of the Art Students League in New York City along with instruction on drawing from the age of six.
Member of the Artist’s Association of Bosnia and Herzegovina ULUBIH.
Studies
Art Student's League of New York City, NYC, USA
Corcoran School of Art, Washington D.C, USA
New York Academy of Art, NYC, USA
Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris, France
“Both the poses she selects for her models and the angles of view she takes lend character to them. By taking a low angle of view of a woman, she makes an otherwise frail-looking figure seem monumental. Conversely, two middle-aged men seem particularly vulnerable, one crouching behind the other, who looks away. All of this is done with subtlety so the quick look culls little.”
“Arbanas is no slave to the precision of realistic detail; she leaves that to photography. In terms of expressionism, she has displayed a wide range of preferences from free brushstrokes to compositions with colouristic surfaces and testing the limits of the artist’s materials. Suzanne Arbanas has thus left her own distinctive mark on the fickle, winding paths of art.”
