“Yes, the elements of which Wanklyn’s paintings are constructed are ineluctably flat: horizontal and vertical bands, and then the squares or rectangles formed by their intersection. Yet she ekes out the maximum push and pull from her canny alliances of colors — a strangely warm blue next to a paradoxically cool pink, or similarly disorienting mixes of sour with sweet, hearty with delicate.”

–Barry Schwabsky, Artforum

Photo: Geoffrey O'Brien

Susan Wanklyn (1951–2025) was an American painter based in Brooklyn whose powerful work bridged post-minimalism and the expansive legacy of Color Field painting. Her art was rooted in an unpretentious, deeply considered use of color and surface, distilling visual experience into subtle fields and reflexive shapes that seem to structure by light and shadow. 

Born in Montreal in 1951, Wanklyn's Quebec childhood was filled with gymnastics and dance, and adventures in forests, lakes, and rivers. She attended Miss Edgar's and Miss Cramp's School, an independent school for girls located in Westmount, Quebec, and later attended Swathmore College, PA to study art and art history. She moved to New York City in the early 1970s, landing in the East Village where she immersed herself in the dance and art communities. She found a “home” at the New York Studio School (1975 to1978) where she inherited a spirit of inquiry from the schools founding in Abstract Expressionism. There she studied intensive drawing and figurative painting with Leland Bell, Charles Cajori, Nicolas Carone, Louis Finkelstein, Mercedes Mater, and George McNeil, as well as critical theory with Meyer Schapiro. Her classmates many of which became lifelong friends included David Fratkin, Joyce Pensato, Jessica Weiss, and Christopher Wool.

Wanklyn was committed to pared-down compositions that emphasized the interplay of colored form and empty space, a sensibility aligned with post-minimalist interest in process, material, and perceptual nuance. Her paintings unfolded with a slow intensity that invited close looking rather than dramatic gestures, revealing subtle gradations and quiet harmonies that expanded the visual field without force. Often the inspiration for her work was found looking out to the back yard of her Brooklyn based studio. 

“I drew from an eclectic mix of visual sources to generate shapes: things seen outside, as well as in books, signs, or museums,” Wanklyn wrote. “The list includes bits of architecture, clothes, boats, letters, gardens, streets, creatures, furniture. The source may or may not be identifiable in the imagery of the paintings, and often a shape will be a composite of a few things.”

Over a long career of exhibitions in New York and beyond, she cultivated a devoted following for work that married a refined formal restraint with a sensitive attention to color and texture, leaving behind a subtly resonant legacy in contemporary abstraction. Wanklyn’s work was featured in group and solo shows in small galleries in New York and beyond. Awards included an artists' residency in Marseilles and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013. After gaining her U.S. residency, Susan worked freelance, and then as a Production Artist at Hachette Books, retiring in 2016 to focus on painting.

Wanklyn absorbed the landscapes of Quebec on voyages down the St. Lawrence River. She feasted on art treasures on trips to Italy with artist friends. In New York she belonged to a close-knit community of artists, while keeping warm ties to family in Canada.

Wanklyn died on October 16, 2025 of cancer.