TitleAlluvial Fantasy
Artist
Susan Shatter
(American, 1943 - 2011)
Date1990
MediumWatercolor and graphite on white wove paper
DimensionsSheet size: 20 5/16 × 46 1/2 in.
Image size: 20 5/16 × 46 1/2 in.
Other (Backing board): 26 3/4 × 50 1/8 in.
SignedSigned in graphite at bottom left: "Shatter '90".
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, Gift of the artist, 1999
Object number1999.6
Label TextSusan Shatter has been working in watercolor since 1972 and is perhaps best known as a watercolorist, although she also works in oil, acrylics and egg tempera. Her paintings depict large-scale mountains, canyons and coastlines that suggest the earth's constant change. "Places where you could see the enormous forces that create land formations without the overlay of vegetation" arouse the most feeling in her, she says, and the result is "a scene that appears vast but visually close up, the spatial dislocation gives a feeling of vertigo, life lived on the edge." She uses watercolors and photos, which she says bring another sense of time to her work, to develop full-scale compositions. "Alluvial Fantasy" depicts a scene from Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, California. Shatter was attracted to the elemental quality of the landscape-a desert that was once an ocean floor. Zabriskie Point is the largest of a very barren and dry group of salt-encrusted hills and outcroppings formed millions of years ago by sedimentation from a lake that covered Death Valley. The vista point was named after Christian Zabriskie, for many years the general manager of the Pacific Coast Borax Company, which conducted mining operations in the Valley.
