Edge, IN, 2025
Acrylic, oil pastel, charcoal on canvas
103 x 73 inches
My New England Home, 2025
Oil, acrylic on canvas
84 x 120 inches
Stella and Finn, 2025
Acrylic on canvas
90 x 133 inches
Little Round Top, PA, 2024
Acrylic on canvas
74 x 103 inches
Mountain Mess, 2022
Acrylic on canvas
94 x 104 inches
Eno River, NC, 2015
Oil on canvas
114 x 90 inches
SUE MCNALLY
Lives and works in Newport, Rhode Island
ARTIST BIO
Sue McNally (b. 1967) is a painter based in Newport, Rhode Island, with a creative practice spanning locations in Rhode Island and southeastern Utah. Raised in New England, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Rhode Island in 1990 and a Master of Fine Arts from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1995. McNally has held prestigious residencies including the Edward E. Elson Artist-in-Residence position at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts. Her work has also been supported by residencies at Carrizozo AIR (New Mexico), McCanna House/North Dakota Museum of Art, Tamarind Institute, Crater Lake National Park, Ucross Foundation, Yaddo, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her artwork is in prominent public and private collections, such as the Addison Gallery of American Art, North Dakota Museum of Art, Tamarind Institute Archive, Worcester Art Museum, RISD Museum, and Newport Art Museum.
Sue McNally has painted landscapes for over 30 years. Through decades of travel and expeditions across the United States, she has developed a deep personal connection to the American landscape. Her work reflects a passionate intensity, vibrant expression, and luminous quality, all skillfully balanced with realism. Depicting mountains, wind, and water, with a delicate ferocity and a sense of playful disorder, she investigates the inherent shapes and proportions of the natural world.Ā
In 2010, Sue McNally embarked on an artistic endeavor, “This Land is My Land,ā€¯ later named the States paintings. Reflecting her experiences and observations of the American landscape, this journey has produced over forty large-scale paintings and murals. It is ongoing, with each piece representing one of the fifty states. The works, incorporating specific and locatable on-site photographs, exemplify her meticulous attention to detail. They convey a sense of grandeur and the enduring beauty of the terrain, replicating impressions as if viewers are standing in her place. Aiming to further explore abstraction, around 2016 and 2017, these works rely on memory as their reference point. Distorted forms, measured shapes, and pictorial harmony express the internal structure of the landscape, showcasing an abstract and elusive quality. The State paintings encapsulate McNallyā€™s aspiration to transform viewed vistas into landscape paintings through the interplay of forms and colors while appropriately scaling nature.
Since 2020, the work has displayed a richer undergrowth of imagery and a delicate transparency that authentically reflects interpretations of experiences rather than merely physical reality. It draws inspiration from Charles E. Burchfieldā€™s romantic and fantastical delineations of nature and Philip Gustonā€™s efforts to harmonize surrealism, abstraction, and figuration. This evolution has been challenging and invigorating. Rich in regal, seasonal, and phantasmagorical elements, the rebellious features unite different structures in the painted images.
Sue McNally is a painter of the scenic and a poet of visual prose. Her landscapes are hallucinatory, cryptic, and mesmerizing. Ghostly turquoise, magenta curtains, and phantasmal yellows in magnified natural forms evoke a striking sense of monumentality. Each mystical and transcendental palette is carefully chosen to meet the specific demands of the structures in the picture planes. They are the invented landscapes and the enduring myths of the terrain ā€” embodiments of the American sublime immortalized in paint. They emphasize that the fleeting beauty of the American land, as it lives on in our minds, is worthy of our reverence. The most essential form of cultural literacy is to read our environment.
