Press
Transcendence
Lakeville Journal, 2025
by Natalia Zukerman
"Suzanne Onodera bridges abstraction and realism in richly layered paintings that capture the complexity and chaos of the natural world. Her brushstrokes are lush, gestural and physical, evoking landscapes not as they are, but as they are felt."
Fresh Paint
Corners Gallery, 2017
by Arthur Whitman
Onodera’s panoramas and landscapes, while drawing inspiration from the landscapes of Wyoming, are actually reinterpreted versions of what she saw during her fellowship. She tried sitting in front of the creek and painting what she saw, she said, but what she painted didn’t get properly filtered through her artistic lens. She set back to her studio, image in mind, and painted something that she felt — not just saw.
"I wonder if people are becoming conditioned now to think of art as blurring the lines between the human touch and the machine touch,” Onodera said. “We want repetition and we want manufactured art — something that’s multiples and can be reproduced fairly quickly that’s clean and perfect — but really that’s so far from what people really want, which is the sense of the human touch.”
The Landscape of Dreams: Corners Gallery showcasing some compelling work
Stan Taft and Suzanne Onodera
Corners Gallery, Ithaca Times, 2016
by Arthur Whitman
Her canvas and panel oils, often large, are abstracted landscapes: contemporary versions of the Romantics’ sublime vistas. While the classical European landscape offers the viewer places to stand, Onodera’s imaginary scenes transmute solid masses into ghostly liquescence. Her use of amorphous fogs and glazes, subtly accented with more visible brushwork, has been characteristic.
Onodera’s work here though has evolved, with her brushstrokes becoming thicker and heavier, with emphatically expressionist blocks of color standing out more against the thinly painted backgrounds.
A diptych on two upright canvases, Traversing the Steep Ravine is the largest piece here and the most overtly ambitious. Patches of acidic green—accented in bright yellow-orange and shadowed in black—help make it legible as a “landscape” but any sense of here-and-there is necessarily slippery. As in other pieces of hers here, a mountain seems to rise in the distance. Both the sky above and the river that winds its way down to our feet are in pale, softly brushed colors. And Other Observations, a smaller near-square piece on panel, is just as compelling. The brushwork is brusque and broken while the palette combines the ethereal and the earthy.
A Wild Cry: Add Onodera to the List of Ithaca’s Best Painters
Corners Gallery, 2014
Ithaca Times
by Arthur Whitman
A Californian turned Ithacan, Suzanne Onodera is one of our best painters. Her oils, often large, echo the romantic and tonalist painters of the 19th century in pushing landscape away from concrete depiction and toward abstraction. The word that usually comes up in discussing her work is “atmospheric.” Rich explorations of texture as form, she builds up layers of thin and sometimes-thickened color—stains, fogs, and accenting brushstrokes—that evoke places imagined or seen through the veil of memory.
Onodera’s solo exhibition “The Wild and the Deep” is imposingly rich in its collective grandeur.
A corner—just to your right as you step in—holds two small but striking paintings. An upswept gray cloud and hefty turquoise sea spotted with black enact a brooding drama in the square-shaped Ocean Deep. Unusual for this show in its color and skinny upright format, Waking Tiepolo evokes the Italian Rococo artist’s gravity-defying multi-figure paintings in its delicate tones—red-purple, fleshy pale pink, baby blue—and roiling brushwork.
A row of upright pieces on unframed sheets of paper have been clipped to a prominent wall. Beneath the Shadow of Night and The Pull of Oblivion pull their painterly theatrics around hazily lit central voids. The Wild Cry of Involuntary Things is particularly gorgeous with its agitated brushiness and fiery cloudscape.
An animating tension between hazy, layered tints of color—reminiscent of the late 19th century tonalist painters like James Whistler and George Inness—and areas where the trace of her brush is more pronounced characterizes Onodera’s work. You can feel the difference: the paradoxically diffuse but weighty quality of her skies and voids versus the palpably gestural movement and tension that traces from her hand. Her laborious building up of these qualities results in work that has a symphonic depth and complexity.
Certain Refuge pairs a particularly pale, hazy sky—it is almost uncomfortable to look at—with a landscape of pale greens, painted in demonstrative patches of relatively thick paint. A river curls from the foreground, leading the viewer into the distance. It seems to absorb the color and light of the sky but also to hold it off, as if to keep it from smothering everything.
In the Low Country we glimpse rusty clouds sweeping down against pale purple-blue sky—towards what might be a lagoon, ghostly olive green water surrounded by shadowed red-brown earth.
A visit to view “The Wild and the Deep” is like taking part in a rich but carefully proportioned meal—filled with a fiercely intelligent sensuality and well-conceived variety. It is a must see for those with a serious interest in painting.
The Finger Lakes is Ripe with Landscape Painters
Ithaca Times, 2014
by Arthur Whitman
Done with painstakingly layered oil paint on both canvas and paper, Suzanne Onodera’s rich work is poised between the palpable and the ethereal. Although often described as abstract, they owe more to the romantic and tonalist landscape artists of the 19th century than to just about anybody from the 20th. Her work distills the genre to its fundamentals: hazily lit atmosphere; suggestions of clouds, smoke, and fire; implied horizons; earth, foliage, and water.
Of her show the Californian turned Ithacan artist says in a statement: “Recently I relocated to the Northeast where the lush and changing land continues to influence my practice in ways I am still unsure. And although I am inspired by land, place and nature, all of my imagery is invented. It is detached from any historical or specific link to time or place. Ultimately, this work is about transcendental beauty and connectivity between humans and nature, and to the self and the sublime.”