Exploring the depths

Thursday, Sept. 1, 2005 | 8:25 a.m.

In Susanne Forestieri's small painting titled "Tina and Shadow," a woman sits on a floral couch talking on the telephone in her well-lit New York apartment. She has just stepped out of the bathtub and covers herself with only a towel.

Next to her is a sleeping black dog. The woman's eyes are fixed on nothing in particular. She is focused on the conversation. The photo-realistic painting offers a glimpse into a fleeting, private moment in a woman's life. The rest of the story is up to you. This is how Forestieri prefers it. With many of her small paintings, her intent is to present a drama for the viewer to play out.

"When I'm painting, I tell myself a story," Forestieri said while standing in Gallery P in the downtown Holsum Lofts. "If I don't know the story, I make up the story."

Forestieri is a former New Yorker who has lived in Las Vegas for 17 years. Much of her work stems from candid photographs of strangers, family members or friends that welcome viewers into off-beat moments in someone's life.

She has thousands of pictures: dancers, diners in cafes, relatives at get-togethers. Occasionally, she'll sneak backstage at a local show to capture dancers during costume changes or while they are engaged in backstage discussions. The more personal the story is to her, the more popular the paintings are among buyers.

"By the way, this is my sister," Forestieri said, pointing to "Tina and Shadow." "She's on the phone. She's always on the phone. And she doesn't even like people. She loves that dog.

"She says her legs are too fat (in the painting). But her legs are fat. That's why I'm not a successful portrait painter."

She's not joking. Now 60, Forestieri, whose work is on display Friday through October at Gallery P, said that she couldn't make it as a commercial portrait painter. She tried. But painting flattering strengths against charming backdrops was not nearly as compelling as the details of the real story.

"I thought, Well, if I'm not going to be a raging success as a portrait artist, I'm going to do what I want to do,' " Forestieri said. "I didn't have to worry about what was popular, what was selling. It was very freeing."

This wasn't her only escape. Frustrated with the art movement's break from traditional figurative painting, Forestieri dropped out of The Cooper Union, a private full-scholarship college in New York City.

"I was struggling because what I wanted to do was in the tradition of Western painting, but what was happening is that they were breaking the rules," she said.

A longtime fan of Vermeer, Hopper and Rembrandt, Forestieri's work occasionally incorporates impressionist strokes and Hopper-esque tones.

She has had success with her traditional style. Her work has been featured in shows throughout the country and in several local galleries. She was part of the two-woman show, "Revealing Women" (2003), with sculptress Roberta Baskin Shefrin at Las Vegas Art Museum.

Most recently Forestieri was featured in "Moving Pictures" at the Charleston Heights Arts Center, the first of several exhibits in a yearlong Las Vegas Centennial celebration, and was also a participating artist in the Winchester neighborhood public art project, "Zap!"

Joseph Palermo, owner of Gallery P, considers Forestieri to be a gifted artist whose work offers an emotional depth not always found in figurative paintings and portraits.

"Even though she works mainly in the portraiture and figurative field, she's still very expressive," Palermo said. "I wanted to show her work in that light. There are a lot of portrait and figurative artists that aren't that competent.

"Her work pulls you in. You feel like you're a part of the scene."

The exhibit at Gallery P, which has a varied collection of contemporary art, features mostly paintings of showgirls and dancers dressing each other. Some were from photos taken backstage. Others were posed in her studio.

One painting, "The Man in the Black Leather Jacket," is of a backstage scene where a group of young women are apparently smittened with a tall dark-haired man in a leather jacket who came to visit them.

"I just walked backstage," Forestieri said. "They completely ignored me. That was perfect."

Another painting in the exhibit portrays Forestieri's grandson and his mother at a birthday party. The mother, looking tired, seems engaged in the party. Her grandson, sitting back comfortably, looks off in the distance.

"They're very close, very warm, but he's 16, he's a teenager," Forestieri said. "He has his own car and is asserting his independence."

Though Forestieri has always painted, she started life wanting to be a ballet dancer, but didn't have the physical capacity for the strenuous moves. She also studied opera, but never got beyond the German lieder.

"The thing about being an artist is that it's so lonely," Forestieri said. "You're all alone in your studio. You might have an opening and meet people, but it wasn't like being in the theatre, the stage and having an audience.

"It's something I've had to deal with. When I started to have success, it was no satisfaction at all."

Her art was sold to collectors through dealers, leaving her to wonder, "Well, who has the art?"

"A lot of people around the country have my work and I don't even know them," Forestieri said. "It's not that I don't want to sell the work, I'm happy to have it out there. I just want to have a connection."

Recently she had an opportunity to meet with a man who bought a painting of hers of a man in a cafe that was featured in an exhibit at the OMMA Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Barbara, Calif.

She had lunch with the 84-year-old collector, who was a retired French literature professor, who talked about his life and his journeys.

"I couldn't have wished for a better experience," Forestieri said.

Working days as art director at Imprint Day School, Forestieri paints when she can and studies the thousands of photographs that she keeps in shoe boxes in her home.

Though she also works with models in her studio, she's devoted to working from photographs.

"There's a lot of give-and-take in photography and painting," Forestieri said. "There's a lot of cross-pollination.

Of painting, she said, "It's like frosting on cake. The thing I like about photography is it's very candid. I never miss a photo opportunity. I wish I just had a camera built into my body.""

Joseph Palermo

GALLERY P OWNER

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