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Make a Silk Purse out of a Sow’s Ear Learning how to see and create design with found objects with Suzanne Visor written by Liz Constable with Susan Quateman “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” A Complete Collection of Polite and Ingenious Conversations and Seven Dialogues, Jonathan Swift “Make a Silk Purse out of a Sow’s Ear” was the daunting message on the door of Suzanne Visor’s classroom at SPIN 2014. This was a workshop on the Elements of Design and Composition, – something that Susan Quateman, a silk painter in her later 50s, hadn’t studied formally within her five years of painting. was sure that her daughter, a Freshman BFA student at Alfred University, had already covered-- and that she, a silk painter in her later 50s who has only been painting for five years --- had never studied formally. ‘A sow’s ear,’ she thought ruefully, as she entered the classroom. YupYes, perhaps it describes her Suzanne’s artistic abilities as well as those of our fellow travelers in this class. But can we indeed make a silk purse from it in just two short days? That was the question. It was oOnly after thise two-day workshop we took with Suzanne Visor at the 2014 SPIN conference did that we fully appreciated the aptness of her workshop title. All the elements of Suzanne’s her original and effective strategies for making art, and teaching composition and design, are embedded in the title. She teaches the artistic and alchemical process implicit in the conversion of a sow’s ear into an elegant silk purse. By focusing on found materials, images and objects present in our everyday lives, she taught us how to design, assemble, and transform them into resonantly dimensional silk art. And tThis process of making art and teaching it provided a remarkably powerful pedagogic strategy for accomplishing the workshop objectives: to use the elements of design to arrive at a good design; to understand the constituents of effective and compelling design; to use innovative and exciting techniques with unusual yet everyday materials to create texture and depth; and to learn how to critique silk painting and design as well as make art with silk and dye. Suzanne underwent her own process of In Suzanne’s own words about her preparations for the workshop., “I was drawing on a memory of 10 years back, maybe. Going through scraps one day, I ran across a piece of jacquard silk painted a delicious pink. Hmmm, maybe there’s
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enough to make one of those attractive little triangular purses that hangs on a wall in a very feminine bedroom. I added a sparkly clasp and a pink satin strap and tassel. Into a show it went, displayed in a lovely acrylic cube all by itself. It sold right away. Why do I use it as an example? I made something out of almost nothing. I put together some compatible materials in a pleasing, luxurious way. The fancy, feminine, toy-like accessory was so dreamy and delicious in that perfect, shiny plastic box that viewers couldn’t resist.” Take that, Reverend Jonathan Swift. The artist and art educator in Suzanne turns this saying around and stands it on its head. Suzanne focuses on the transformative learning potential of working in, and with, what
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surrounds her in her everyday environment. As an art educator, Suzanne demonstrated abundant
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ways to expand our artistic and design range by being open to re-using materials at hand. From the mundane - paper and glue, torn or cut cardboard - to the grandeur and majesty of the sweeping New Mexican horizons and the sediments of lives and histories inhabiting these desert spaces;, these things become her subject-matter. As Susan discovered during the drive with Suzanne from Albuquerque to the IAIA near Santa Fe,During their drive to Santa Fe, Susan discovered that Suzanne, an art teacher of 30 years, is a balloon crew member and works as an art educator at the Balloon Museum in Albuquerque. She has taught art for over 30 years. Although originally from Pennsylvania, she Suzanne has lived in New Mexico since she was 24, and feels completely entranced with, and embraced by, the New Mexicoits landscape,: the colors, and the skies. “My world of red mesas, mountains and deserts…this place and time inspires, makes me feel I belong.” Albuquerque, the ballooning capital of the World, is a place where is the capital of ballooning in the World. Yyou can often look out at the sky and see many balloons bobbing about on the seemingly never-endingendless horizon. Susan asked Suzanne whether she looks at landscapes from different perspectives – from ground level and from up above and looking across the sky or downwards, , as if in a balloon.? At first Suzanne seemed perplexed, as if she had never been asked this question. Then, she indicated that Desert Detritus, and Homeward Bound, (insert Images 1 and 2) were both envisaged by her, and so were painted, from a balloonist’s perspective. As Suzanne explained, “tTwo of my three paintings in the SPIN 2014 Festival fine arts exhibition were directly inspired by the balloon experiences. Several years ago, having crossed the Rio Grande, a friend and I journeyed northwest over the West Mesa area, a vast expanse of
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open space not yet claimed by housing developers. We gazed at the ground below as it came closer while picking out a spot to land. My friend pointed out a dark circular shape on the ground, then another. At the same moment my friend and I recognized the markings exclaiming, ‘pit house ruins!’ These sightings are the remains of prehistoric dwellings that were essentially underground homes fashioned by ancient Pueblo peoples about whom we know very little, even to this day. I have thought about that sighting many times and imagined what life might have been like. Much hardship, danger, and constant effort to keep a family going.” Desert Detritus was inspired by these thoughts. As Suzanne discussed her painting with us,with us that the layers of meaning in Desert Detritus unfold the social and environmental history of large areas of the US Southwest. This desert environment was marked as nuclear wasteland from the 1940s onwards by the development of nuclear energy, the Manhattan Project and, the construction of Los Alamos on the Pajarito Plateau. Suzanne’s intense colors and palimpsestic effects inscribe the layers of Native American lives, and the desert’s other inhabitants. As Suzanne she pointed out, the intense aridity of the desert serves to preserve objects and artifacts that would otherwise disintegrate, rust, or decay. As this painting indicates, Suzanne’s subject- matter emerges from her full involvement with the present and past of her everyday environment. Her highly contextual art transforms a dual perspective - gained from an aerial view together with a grounded perspective deeply and richly informed by her awareness of the social life, past and present, of New Mexico - into structured, passionately vibrant compositions that so powerfully render the three -dimensionality of the New Mexican desert landscape in silk and dye. ASuzanne’s cartographic impulse characterizes Suzanne’s her artistic work. Even at a young age she enjoyed the rewards of scanning landscapes and identifying different landmarks. , and she recounts her early memories of the rewards of scanning the landscape, identifying the landmarks: “As a little girl I remember unfolding a large cardboard map of the world during the latter days of WWII. My sister and I would lie on the floor on our tummies looking at the shapes and colors of countries. We especially were fascinated by Madagascar. We loved that name. “I have memories of listening to the nightly news on the radio while we had dinner each evening, Lowell Thomas and the Nightly News. We knew that World War meant many countries throughout the world were involved and where they were.
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“I’ve always loved maps. Traveling and exploring the world, from the woods and strip mine of the farm we grew up on to visiting the East African plains and the depths of Copper Canyon in Mexico.” Although Suzanne enjoyed the adventure that lies in traveling, she also appreciates the comforts of home. “Flying across the country throughout my life, I look forward to coming
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home to New Mexico. From the east I gaze from the window for glimpses of crop circles in Kansas; then gradually the arid, red mesas and mountains that are home appear. The paths that water and snow melt take in their rapid descent to the desert floor make wonderful meandering trails like the veins I see in my hands. Lifelines feed both the land and my body.” We students experienced a very rich two days of learning together, at the SPIN 2014 Festival, fFrom Suzanne’s artistic foci. She focused on ---aerial perspectives; grounded perspectives in the social and environmental histories of place and space; collecting and re-using of found images and objects; building of texture and perspective through unusual materials and techniques; and situating art critique, which is as equally important as art making---.we students experienced a very rich two days of learning together. We were thrilled to find that we wereit was a class of four very independent and creative people. Just one of us, German-born Nandy who now lives in St. Kitts, has a lifetime experience
Comment [A1]: Was it a class of four or a class taught by four?
of vibrant painting as her primary occupation. Nandy continually astonished us by her ability to totally think outside of the box. Together with Nandy, we were two Anglo-Americans, one trained and working in the interdisciplinary Humanities and Gender Studies (Liz), the other in
Comment [A2]: Last name?
city planning/landscape design (Susan) and a Denver-based former landscape architect (Nancy).
Comment [A3]: Last name?
Suzanne presented us with a clear and well- prepared document of how the interactive class was going to proceed, – which in truth we only half followed. This was to the absolute benefit of the workshop since our interactions re-directed the later parts of the workshop. She wanted her students to learn how to see, and to see in terms of compositional design, in order to
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paint well. I suspect that this premise applies to her students across the board, and her class laid
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the groundwork for seeing by establishing the primacy of the elements and principles of design for our work. One of Suzanne’s objectives was to developpment of our skills in critique and self-critique. Sharing our creative processes laid the groundwork for a supportive environment in which to develop our critical toolbox.
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Our workshop opened with each of us discussing the forces and presences shaping that shape our specific aesthetic and our objectives in placing dye on silk. From Suzanne’s invitation
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to explain our journeys to silk painting – the landmark passages, roadblocks, and future directions – we discovered unexpected convergences among usourselves. There was the significance of space and place: music, ecology - particularly the effects of climate change along with our interests in landscape architecture, the natural environment and the Caribbean culture of St. Kitts., We combined these to create a matrix of intersecting threads from which a lively and interactive dynamic emerged. One of Suzanne’s objectives was development of our skills in critique and self-critique. Sharing our creative processes laid the groundwork for a supportive environment in which to develop our critical toolbox. As Susan and I talked about the workshop, and sought to identify our shared sense of themes unifying Suzanne’s own silk paintings and her creative process, Susan she pointed us to the concept of “design assemblage,” the three-dimensional relative of collage and bricolage (something constructed using the things at hand). Immediately we both recognized how effectively the concept of ‘design assemblage’ enabled us to describe Suzanne’s artistic process
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as well as her teaching in the workshop. How does the concept of design assemblage help us describe Suzanne’s approach to
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teaching the elements of design (line, texture, shape, direction, size, color and value)? And what light does it throw cast on her ways of teaching the principles of design (balance, gradation, repetition, harmony, unity, dominance, and contrast)? The abstract terms of balance, contrast, unity, etc., can easily remain inert on the page for us artist-learners, resisting our intense desires to integrate their meanings into our own work. And aAs a skilled instructor, Suzanne found a strategy that helped us breathe new life into these terms, and coax them out of their inert passive abstract muteness. It is Suzanne’s her strategy for engaging us with the process of de-composing and composing - breaking down through diagrams and line analysis, and re-constructing forms - that Susan and I are naming assemblage as artistic technique and pedagogy. In the United States, the artists who come to mind with assemblage - those who created three-dimensional, sculptural works of art often from heterogeneous objects collected and found - were working primarily in the 1950s and 1960s.: Indeed, in 1961, the New York Museum of
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Modern Art brought together 252 works of collage and 141 works of assemblage for their Art of Assemblage exhibition. William Seitz, author of the 1961 book, The Art of Assemblage, describes the artist drawn to assemblage as follows: “like a beachcomber, a collector, or a scavenger wandering among ruins, the assembler discovers order as well as materials, by accident” (Seitz, 38) (set-off). In the context of European Mmodernist art, in the period between 1910 and 1920,
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Picasso, Braque, Dubuffet, and the Dadaïsts, all worked with cut-outs, glued paper (papier collé, in French, that gives us our word, collage) and experimented with relating parts and aspects to the whole that they composed. Cubist, Futurist, Surrealist, and Dadaist artists in the early twentieth century all practiced the de-composition materialized through breaking down and undoing finished work (everyday objects) as a preparatory process to the re-composing and reassembling of the parts in two and three dimensional works of art. The resulting objects were invested with a new meaning, and a meaningone that invariably embodied an implicit comment on everyday life, culture, or the politics of art and culture. So, hHow did Suzanne transform the concept of assemblage to make it such a helpful learning tool for design and composition? Through a series of carefully structured exercises, Suzanne she taught us how to re-think the rendering of objects in space on paper or silk; to re-set our brains when faced with laying out the ‘bones’ or the basic structures of designing a new silk painting or silk garment; to learn textural and shading techniques that produce the illusion of perspective and three dimensions in a two- dimensional medium; and to do this even when our drawing skills may feel limiting to us. Suzanne led us to begin from old art journals and magazines (the collector at work!). From here, we selected images that formed the raw materials for our critical, analytic decomposition of the works into their elements of design: line, texture, shape, direction, size, color and value. In and of itself, this exercise, the “squint eye” exercise, as one of us calls it (where you train you eye to move past the teeming surface details of a composition to focus instead on the structure), proves to be an invaluable exercise in seeing the ways other artists create their design and composition. In Suzanne’s words: “do this: go to a magazine, preferably an art magazine; select some images that appeal to you. Use your little [rectangular cut cardboard] viewer to help you discover the abstract designs hidden therein. Cut them out, paste them in your sketchbook add more lines
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and color; make the design grow vertically or horizontally. Use these exercises as jumping off places to create your own personal piece of art that you think you are connected to. Then, get these exercises out of the way. They will be a distraction. Choose the sketch that most appeals to you. One you feel connected to. One that you like the most. One more time, draw or paint it big, keep going, changing, making it grow. Now you have no fear of facing the plain white silk.” As we practiced with several variants of this method, we each worked quickly, using a
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range of materials and tools of our own choice. , and fromThen, from the abstract elements of design we traced in a found image, we reworkinged these parts and elements into a design and composition of our own creation (See images 3, 4, 5, 6). Breaking down the compositional elements in images taught us to identify abstract structural devices that relied on various means: line, mass, contrast, spatial arrangement, value or color. Suzanne taught us to look more attentively, analytically , and critically, at the shapes, patterns and colors in our world. Whether looking through a simple rectangular viewer or through the compositional design of objects in art magazines, we then reinterpreted these compositional strategies to create our own designs. And Tthis is why we called this it “Assemblage Design.” From the starting images that we had created, one element builds on the preceding element, and our designs and compositions emerged. Suzanne also taught us to look at color through the pedagogic and artistic framework of assemblage: “Assemblage Color.” Most of us silk painters experience the appeal of the luminously bright colors in our dye palettes that are rendered even more strikingly intense and bright once the silk is steamed. However, as Suzanne pointed out, overuse of the bright colors the primaries and the luminous colors - can easily lend a rather crude paint box feel to our work, . Oone that might best be reserved for subject-matter that truly demands such exuberance. As Suzanne puts it, “the real appeal of silk dyes initially is the brilliance, the purity of the colors. I think that’s a real problem for many silk painters. We are so seduced by all that eye-candy that we forget that we are the painters and must tame those hues to serve us in order to grow as artists.” Instead, Suzanne provided us, instead, with a range of unusual and innovative techniques for muting and nuancing colors to create a very powerful visual effect. To build a subtle textured background to in our paintings, she demonstrated a technique that once again owes its materials to the principles of re-usinge, salvaginge, and collecting. Suzanne keeps the small squares of
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kitchen paper towel used in her studio to mop up spilt or unused dye. To create a background texture on a painting, Sshe places pieces of dry yet heavily dye-soaked kitchen paper towels on the white silk, then sprays them with water, and applies gentle pressure to create a background texture on a painting.: Tthe resulting effect is that the white silk underneath picks up hints of color in a mottled, abstract fashion. Just as the assemblage artist welcomes the accidental, this last technique clearly requires openness to the unpredictable that Suzanne so imaginatively works with in her art. She demonstrated techniques for creating fluid, organic, and yet clean dye, not gutta, edges on the silk by using torn cardboard edged stencils. Keeping in mind thatIf we tend to associate stencils with hard edges, Suzanne instead suggests placinges torn cardboard on the silk before painting or lightly spraying dye along the edge, being careful to wear a mask when spraying dye with an atomizer. The resulting edges lend themselves exquisitely well to abstract landscape designs, since they have none of the geometric feel of hard edges, but evoke rather the rugged edges of cliffs, or the undulating edges of beaches and rivers. We learned a range of textures that resulted from lightly spraying dyes from an atomizer bottle or painting dyes over found objects that served as stencils. For example, the varieties of cross-hatching that result from using dye with mesh on silk; the ridges and valleys of liquid shapes that result from folding or crumpling the silk before lightly spraying the whole bundle of silk; and the dye brush strokes that hold their form when dye is thickened with sodium alginate. Suzanne’s mastery of these techniques produced astonishing silk paintings with threedimensional effects that are strikingly original in silk painting. In Homeward Bound, we see, from a balloonist’s perspective, cranes flying perpendicular to the mountain face, , from a balloonist’s perspective, combined with the softest hues found in the landscapes of New Mexico that fold, one folding into onethe another in an utterly pleasing way. Suzanne wrote of the birds in this painting. “The cranes over the Rio Grande have been a part of life here since prehistoric times! When they come in the fall from northern Idaho, we know because we hear them first. Their call is distinct and clear as a bell in the pure blue sky. They, however, are so high above us that we can't see them unless the sun catches the flock just right! “ As for the development of our critical skills, learning ‘design assemblage’ allowed us to feel more confident to embark on constructive critique. Our eyes were newly trained to “see” hidden compositional structures and designs, and . Oour minds were newly sensitized to the
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significance of the abstract designs underlying paintings. Both our eyes and minds were, consequently, searching and probing more, becoming less easily distracted by the artist’s choice of subject- matter in and of itself. Our questions and discussions centered on three related topics: how to engage in constructive critique, the preparatory imperatives for presenting one’s work in a gallery or exhibition, and the criteria used to judge silk painting by SPIN Festival judges. Those of us with less experience in exhibiting our artwork learned a tremendous amount from Suzanne about the importance of consummate workmanship and aesthetic sensitivity to the finishing: mounting, framing, choice of rods for wall hangings that do not impinge on or distract from the work. We learned that the final stages of a work’s presentation for exhibition are, in fact, crucially significant to the whole. The analogue of our workshop: that the subject-matter of our painting, so often our primary focus, - is in fact perhaps less significant than a strong compositional design. Since we had the Seasons of Silk fine art show for the SPIN Festival 2014 nearby to explore, Suzanne readily accepted our suggestion to discuss the compelling exhibited works. The resulting discussion dialogue challenged us to articulate our critical questions. We discussed
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examined criteria for the critique and appreciation of silk painting. Through analyzing, conceptualizing, and critiquing our own art making, we learned from collaborative, constructive critique. In turn, this enables us to become more knowledgeable and active participants in SPIN. None of this would have been so enjoyable or productive without the environment of empathy and solidarity fostered by Suzanne’s workshop.
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