First of all, my thanks to Susan Richardson for all of the time she has given me. I've enjoyed getting to know her...such a genuinely nice person. Susan is a mixed media artist who moved to Tracy about five years ago. Her work incorporates collage, paint, found texts, and calligraphy. Susan has always been a driven person. With a Ph.D. in Education in Language and Literacy, Susan worked in the corporate world for years but was ambivalent about her career choices. As she says, her true heart lies with the creative. When she and her husband were unable to find jobs they wanted during the recession, they made the dramatic decision to retire early and move to Tracy. Susan decided that what started out as the worst thing had now become the best. She could now be an artist. After having a successful career, Susan was surprised when she applied to five MFA programs in the area and was rejected by all of them. It was interesting to me that she didn't give up. Instead, she applied to a certificate program in visual arts through Berkeley and spent the next four years honing her skills and thinking deeply about her art. I have called this post The Weight of Words because, as Susan related her experiences to me, I was intrigued by the way words shaped her art. She incorporates words, parts of poems, and letter forms in her pieces. But, the words that were used by her professors and mentors to describe her art altered her creative process. In one of her painting classes, Susan brought in two large canvases for a critique. As she described them, they were pretty and pastel. The professor, a woman who Susan admired, said one painting looked like cake frosting, and the other, wallpaper. She told Susan that if she wanted to be successful as an artist, especially as a woman, that she needed gravitas. Although devastated, this criticism pushed Susan to examine her work and explore her intention. Her color palette began to change and she chose to focus on darker subject matter. Susan spent time thinking about her family's past. Her mother escaped being sent to a concentration camp because she was part of a group of children who were transported by train from Vienna to England and given to British families to raise. Although later reunited with her family, her mother's experience was central to Susan's understanding of her life. She completed a series of five works based on these memories and incorporating words from a Miguel Hernandez poem Last Song, "The claw will be gentle. Allow me this hope." When Susan took these five works to a professor to be critiqued, she was told they were too sentimental, too personal. The mentor encouraged her to create art with universality. I was surprised when Susan told me this story. It made me think about the purposes of art and whether something that had a clearly personal connection could be fine art. What does universality mean in this context? (More about these thoughts in another post.)
Regardless of what I thought about these comments, Susan chose to reexamine her intention yet again. While her recent works had been about tragedy, they had also been about how people go on with their lives after their terrible experiences. Susan had always appreciated the lyrics from the Beatles' song Blackbird, "Take these broken wings and learn to fly." In fact, she'd had a connection to the concept of wings for some time. Several of her pieces incorporate wings, such as her three collages created after hearing Pablo Neruda's poem Poetry, in which he describes poetry as finding him with "fever or forgotten wings,..." Susan created a series of wings; the first one incorporating the word "never" torn from a work of calligraphy. The word "never" expressed the idea of never believing in herself enough to take the leap and fly, so making those first wings was her way of breaking free from those limits. As she talked about her work with others, they shared their stories of survival and gave her items to use in her work. The wings represent the ways in which people overcome tragedy. It seems that Susan's wings - although based on personal stories - were able to inspire feelings of connection with her audience. I plan to write more about Susan, her studio, and the issues her story raised in my mind, but I wanted to use this initial entry to introduce her and share a part of her story that I found intriguing.
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April 2022
AuthorTiffanie Heben is a photographer who has been inspired by the artists in her community |