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New York–based painter Sue Carlson brings a distinctly musical sensibility to abstraction. Originally trained as a classical musician and musicologist, she received a B.A. in music from Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Institute of Music before earning an M.F.A. in visual art from California Institute of the Arts, where she studied with John Baldessari. After moving to New York, Carlson worked as a studio assistant to Elizabeth Murray and Lucio Pozzi. Her paintings have been exhibited at numerous venues, both in the U.S. and internationally. 

“My first serious work of visual art, made when I was 20, was actually a musical score for a piece by early 20th century composer and electronic music pioneer  Edgar Varese. I invented a new notation of shapes and colors to represent the new sounds of Varese’s music. Though trained as a classical music performer and musicologist, I found that I really wanted to make things, expressive things, non-narrative things, “concrete” things which could use the model of musical language as a way of embracing the poetry of light and space. I was excited to see that the thing people called “abstract painting”  could be as rich and complex and intimate as western music has been for many centuries, that ” abstract painting” was on a developmental trajectory, that it was just beginning to embody its potential. I switched from music school to art school, and entered the Visual Arts program at Cal Arts with an aesthetic inclination which was rare at that school, especially in the early 1980s. It was perfect for me. ”