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Figurative painter Wendy Sussman, a professor of art practice at the University of California, Berkeley, died of cancer on March 29 near her home in Oakland. She was 51.  

In her large-scale canvases, diminutive figures materialize within vast fields of layered paint, deepening the metaphysical questions her paintings raise about the pressure of time and space on our mortality.  

A passionate artist and inspirational teacher, Sussman was considered by many to be the “soul” of the Department of Art Practice.  

As a teacher, Sussman brought abstract concepts down to earth, making them profound. According to UC Berkeley undergraduate Christie Lyons, “She was one of those teachers, when you left the class, you were happy to be alive.”  

In 1986, Sussman won a Rome Prize Fellowship that enabled her to study early Renaissance painting at the American Academy in Rome. According to her husband, art critic Juan Rodriguez, Academy Fellows Martin Puryear and Bruce Nauman (both abstract sculptors), performance artist Vito Acconci, and conceptual artist Mel Bochner “had a tremendous influence on her thinking about art.”  

Aiming to become a “modern” artist, Rodriguez said, “she left the idea of the figure/ground in Rome.”  

Over the next 15 years, Sussman gradually developed a subtle and innovative form of painting in which space could not be defined as characteristically figurative or abstract. “I manipulate the ground,” she once wrote, “to resist the figure and make the figure struggle to come into being.”  

But Sussman also experienced a dramatic stylistic shift after her parents died within three months of each other in 1989, the year she came to UC Berkeley to teach. “I always considered myself a realist,” she told a writer reviewing her work in 1996.  

She is survived by her husband of 30 years, Juan Rodriguez, and their 14 year-old son, Gabriel Sussman Rodriguez. A remembrance and celebration of her life is being planned for early May. For information, contact the Department of Art Practice at (510) 642-2582.  

In lieu of flowers, donations for Gabriel's education may be sent to Squeak Carnwath, Custodian for Gabriel Sussman Rodriguez, Account #101-039818-590, c/o Douglas E. Treter, Morgan Stanley, 101 California St., P.O. Box 7805, San Francisco, CA 94120-9647.