Remembering Susan Shatter

watercolor by Susan Shatter

I only recently learned of Susan's death, and thought I'd share some memories of her. I met her in 1998, when she had an exhibit of her wonderful watercolor paintings at the Huntington Museum of Art in WV, and I had the opportunity to spend a weekend with her.

watercolor by Susan Shatter

Some of her large watercolors were 12' long! She liked to put the paper on the floor and just go for it! They look pretty abstract up close, but if you step back about 10 feet, they snap into focus. The viewer is just surrounded by them.

She loved painting plein air landscapes because she said it "put her in accord with the vast mystery."
She liked high viewpoints which make the middle ground the foreground, and the background the middle. The high viewpoints also tend to pitch the viewer forward into the painting.
She liked to have the light in her paintings appear to come from the land, and to use a diagonal or serpentine division of space.
She loved the Isabey squirrel quill brushes.
Her small plein air studies were painted on conventional watercolor blocks and were used as a reference for structure and color, along with photos, when she worked on her large studio paintings.
She preferred painting deserts, canyon lands, rocky coasts, the patterns created by water... (no green pastures for this artist!)
Often the local color of the rocks in a scene was gray, so she'd make up her own  colors. In Peru, she used the colors of local native weavings for the rocks.
She said it took about a month (yes, you read that right!) of adding layers of paint on her large watercolor paintings to get colors as rich as hers are!

Charles Le Clair, in his book, Color in Contemporary Painting, says that her work has "a structural quality that takes its cue from the repetitive forms of Cezanne's late landscapes. Thus the rock formations... set up rhythms that read as pure abstraction..."

She was elected as president of the National Academy of Design, and was represented by one of the finest galleries in New York: quite an accomplishment for a woman artist, working in watercolor!

painting by Susan Shatter

After her diagnosis with breast cancer, she said she had been looking a lot at x-rays, that were dark, with a white spinal column in the middle, and it was influencing her work: It was like a dancing white line in the ocean. Bones returning to their source. See the spinal column in the painting above... She spoke quite a bit about the transitory nature of life. She also began experimenting with acrylic inks and monoprints at that time.

For more about Susan Shatter, check these links:
http://www.artcritical.com/2011/09/29/susan-shatter-1943%E2%80%932011/
http://www.askart.com/askart/s/susan_louise_shatter/susan_louise_shatter.aspx
http://www.dfngallery.com/artists/artists_represented/susan_shatter.htm

I hope you enjoyed reading this, and if you are an artist, maybe it gave you some ideas for your own paintings. Please forward this to any of your friends who might be interested.

The Girl with the Pearl Earring - De Young Museum

The Girl with the Pearl Earring has come to San Francisco, and I got to see her at the De Young Museum! Going to museums and seeing works by great artists always has a renewing effect on me!

According to the signs on the wall, this painting is not a portrait of an actual person, but instead is a tronie. In other words, the artist was trying to capture a facial expression or historic character, but not the likeness of an actual person. (Wow, how disappointing for those of us who saw the movie, Girl with a Pearl Earring, starring Scarlett Johansson!)

Works by other Dutch artists of the same time period were also part of the exhibit. One thing that immediately stood out was the simplicity of this work. Many of the works by other artists were so highly detailed, it looked like the artists used a 3-hair brush, and maybe a magnifying glass. That was the predominant style of the day. While The Girl with the Pearl Earring was painted very simply, with wide brushes, few strokes and minimal detail. The pearl itself was painted with three brush strokes! The earring probably was not a real pearl, but a glass bead painted to look like a pearl.  

The Girl is the only painting by Vermeer in the show. She looks like she has just turned her head and is about to speak to us. There is a feeling of life and movement in the painting, and her gaze seems directed toward something to the right of us, which makes it even more mysterious.

The painting itself appeared much lighter than the picture above, and the skin tones looked somewhat chalky. The lights and shadows were both painted with cool colors. This gave the painting a modernist look. I wondered if the recent cleaning and removal of yellowed varnish might have changed it. But, I'm glad to have had the opportunity to see it!