Three
Collections

Sullivan has always placed the human figure at the centre of her attention - not as subject but as presence. From the weathered faces of Wyoming ranchers to Ugandan market sellers, blues legends to a child in Thailand, she paints with the patience of someone who has sat across from real people and looked at them long enough to know them.

These works range from the monumental quiet of Olaf to the charged intimacy of Blue, Sullivan's self-portrait. Across four decades and five continents, the through-line is the same: belief that a face, painted honestly, carries more information than any document.

Sullivan paints landscape on location - standing in the place, working in the weather. The canal at Coryell, fog lifting over Bald Eagle State Park, first light on the Teton range - these are not composed from imagination but observed with patience and painted with urgency before the light changes.

Her landscapes range widely: intimate canal scenes from the Delaware River valley, vast skies of Wyoming and Idaho, the rugged coast of Maine, and field scenes from Uganda and India. Each carries the mark of the specific day that produced it.

FingerSmears is Sullivan's defining contribution to participatory art. Beginning in 1994, she began producing large-scale paintings on single canvases - made without brushes, with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of participants pressing colour into the surface with their bare hands.

Each work is produced for and with a specific community - a corporation, a school, a music festival, a village - and bears the visual and social character of that encounter. Over 100,000 people have participated across five continents.