Customer Spotlight: An interview with Glenn Suokko
This post is part of our ongoing series highlighting the work, expertise, and creative practices of Metropolitan Picture Framing customers.
Glenn Suokko’s work as a painter, designer, photographer, and writer shares a single animating pursuit: clarity, balance, and beauty in the everyday world.
For over thirty years, he has worked as an artist from his studio at his home on Barberry Hill in Woodstock, Vermont, and shows his work at his own gallery. Rooted in the seasons of rural Vermont, his work moves between structure and intuition, restraint and responsiveness.
Educated at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he earned an MFA, Suokko built a distinguished career in book design—creating more than two hundred art books and catalogues for museums, galleries, and publishers. His work is held in the permanent collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
As the author and designer of his own books, he photographs and writes about the landscapes, people, and quiet rhythms of rural life that have long shaped his vision, reflecting a lifelong belief that art and daily life are united.
Can you describe the process that you use?
Thank you for inviting me to share my thoughts with you and your readers.
I’m an oil painter. My painting practice encompasses still life, landscape, and abstraction, often navigating the space between representation and pure form. By returning to familiar motifs across successive series, I allow shifts in luminosity and texture to gradually distill the subject.
Over many decades I’ve experimented with various techniques as a way to develop my own creative process—one that is varied rather than singular. Eventually all my investigations settled into a distinctive visual vocabulary, even though the paintings are thematically very different.
What led you to start using Metropolitan frames?
Many years ago, I couldn’t find clean, contemporary frames at my local framers, so I searched online and found Metropolitan Picture Framing. I was immediately drawn to the floating frames and to profiles that could be custom-made in my choice of wood, color, and finish. Framing with Metroframe quickly changed everything: the frames complemented my work, collectors loved them, and sales flourished.
Horizons (Landscape),16 x20, oil on canvas mounted to wood panel, Signed: on reverse
121 walnut floater frame with black interior
Do you typically place your orders online or by phone?
The website makes ordering clear and easy through a step-by-step process, and because I can place an order any time of day or night, I tend to order online. However, I love speaking directly with Adrienne when I have a question—or when she has a question for me—just to make sure the framing is perfect. And because I once lived and worked in Minneapolis, it gives me a chance to catch up on a city I love.
How have you set up your studio for framing?
My studio is a separate building from my home in rural Vermont. It’s a commute of twenty-four feet, made easy by a covered porch that connects the two. It’s a barn-like building I designed and had built, with room for painting, for study, for framing, and for conversation around a fireplace when friends or collectors visit to see new work. The frames arrive at my door well packed, and when I’m ready, the Metroframe system makes it easy to fit the paintings. A large, cushioned work surface makes this final step a pleasure.
How do you promote your work?
I promote my work through my website, on Instagram, and at my gallery, ten miles down the river from my studio. It is not an art gallery in the true sense of the term—today I show only my paintings and antiquarian objects. I consider it a series of quiet rooms in which to present my work to the public, a space for visitors interested in seeing art. The installation of artwork matters deeply to me—a sensibility shaped by years working with art museums. The gallery is where I meet my audience in person, where dialogue takes place around the work and often extends beyond it. These brief first encounters often lead to lasting relationships. I am lucky: my website connects me to a committed group of collectors across the country and abroad—as far away from Vermont as Asia and Australia. I also make connections with my audience by email through my monthly “Art Letter,” featuring new paintings, upcoming exhibitions, books and catalogues, and a thought or two about the work. I am pleased that so many subscribers take the time to write back.
What advice would you offer to emerging artists about building a successful professional practice?
I think many artists ask themselves this over the course of their careers. Having worked in the art world to promote art and artists, while also being an artist and a gallerist, I am often asked for advice. After many years of wrestling with what “success” actually means, I dug deep and wrote and published a book, A Quiet Success, as an attempt to answer the question for myself and to offer stories of the lives of artists who built their practices far from the spectacle of the art world. My answer—not the answer most artists would expect—is in the book. In the end, it’s simple: a creative life sustained over time, true to one’s values, and enough on its own terms is success.
