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As a teenager, Susan was sure she was going to
be a social worker or a psychologist. Doing her graduate work
in NYC, she lived across the street from a pottery studio in
Greenwich Village. As a lark, she decided to take a class. Her
world changed dramatically. She finished out the semester, picked
up all her belongings, and moved to San Francisco to become
a potter. This was 1970, and the world was changing very quickly.
Susan was lucky enough to make a modest living, and continued
the life of the lowly potter for about 5 years. She would sell
on the street during Christmas, and during the rest of the year,
sell out of a local gallery.
Poverty got tiresome, and in 1978 Susan started a wholesale
pottery business. She sold the business in 1994, ending with
18 employees and close to 2000 accounts. What to do next?
She realized that pottery had become a commercial venture for
her and in order find my creative herself again, she had to
change mediums. Susan took some private welding lessons, rented
a studio, and went into seclusion for the next year - making
every mistake she could in the welding process, and trying every
technique she could find to bring color to the medium.
The immediacy of the welding process brought out new parts of
her creativity, and eventually she found that oil paints applied
thinly on cleaned steel would give me the transparent colors
she wanted. Her first open studio was a tremendous success and
her new career as a metal working artist was launched. Susan
found she had a distinctive artistic voice as a woman working
in a traditionally male medium.
Her work is mostly functional. She is slightly overwhelmed by
a blank canvas, but if you give her limits (a clock, mirror,
table, etc.) she liked to push the envelope as far as she can.
Susan start by creating a dissonant design, and then the fun
begins by trying to resolve it into a finished form. Her style
leans strongly towards Cubism - partly because of the nature
of sheet steel, and partly from personal taste. She drifted
into Retro, but usually with a cubist edge. Her works are usually
abstract but she always tries to introduce some form of humor
or lightness into the finished form.
Susan says that clocks are her specialty. She thinks of them
as sculptures that happen to tell time. Doing a clock gives
her an enormous freedom of form, and she loves the way the moving
part (all her clocks have pendulums) calls attention to the
art piece. The mechanisms run with a AA battery which generally
lasts one to two years.
Mirrors are a challenge, according to Susan. They have a tendency
to want to be symmetrical, and her creative work is to break
that mold and come up with something different, but just as
functional. Hopefully, she succeeded.
Her outdoor pieces are made of aluminum, painted with oxide
dyes, and then coated with the strongest UV coating she could
find. Outdoor work is challenging to her because the sun tries
its hardest to neutralize color.
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914
water street, port townsend, washington 98368 | telephone (360) 385-3630