FEATURES

Artists of Cirque

Cynthia Steele

Time Taken, Scenes Painted, and Canvases

Treasured: Talking with Long-time Cirque Artists

Sheary Clough Suiter and Nard Claar

Colorado Springs lies at the foott of the Rocky Mountains, near glacier-carved Pikes Peak, a landmark leading to its 14,114foot. summit. The city's Garden of the Gods Park features 300-foot tall red-sandstone formations. Perfect for mountain climbers and serious biking enthusiasts, like long-term Alaskan artists, now Colorado transplants Nard Claar and Sheary Clough Suiter, who can view both of these local landmarks from their home in Colorado Springs.

When Sheary and Nard met in 2007 at an art seminar in Taos, New Mexico, Sheary was living in Alaska and Nard in Colorado. In short order, they followed and found their bliss—a space to share where they could create art more effectively and join a strong artistic community. Their art follows social conscience and represents glimpses of their well-traveled world.

Nard’s roles have been as varied as his art, including as wilderness guide, ski instructor, carpenter, and commercial photographer. Born and raised in Colorado, he’s climbed all the Fourteeners and some of the Thirteeners. For the uninitiated, Colorado has 54 mountain peaks exceeding 14,000 feet—the most of any state. He’s skied and raced mountain bikes before mountain bikes were a thing. On the Continental Divide Trail, a rugged track through the Rocky Mts., he reminisces with typical humor: “I had 18 different bear encounters over the course of a month. Since I was not having bacon, the bear went on his way. I am not a tasty treat, and without a bacon wrap was not desired.”

Together, Nard and Sheary bike toured extensively, traveling self-supported with fully loaded panniers, often tent camping. Their accommodations, whether in a tent or in homes, were often facilitated by Warm Showers, an international biking overnighting/hosting group that offers reciprocal hospitality for thousands of cyclists.

Sheary explains: “In New Orleans, we stayed with a couple (members of Warm Showers). They had spent much of their life traveling the world using art for therapy. And so they were super intriguing hosts.”

Biking fosters the natural influences found in their art.

Sheary: “For about ten years, we've bike toured annually for two to three weeks in different parts of the country. You see the world at a slower pace. You interact with people because you're a novelty. People come up and want to meet you and talk with you. It’s a whole different way to travel. Our most strenuous tour was from Jasper, Alberta, to Whitefish, Montana, which included a lot of elevation gain and loss. But our longest tour was from Austin, Texas to St. Augustine, Florida—about 2000 miles.”

Nard, a mixed media artist, likens his style to Impressionistic work, which tends to abstract and emotionalize images rather than representing them as captured photography. Only about ten percent of his art is done on location; he travels with a little watercolor palette to paint in the evenings. “I love the ability to do travelogues and small watercolors, as well as take photographs while traveling. But I also just love the freedom of being able to take watercolors and do contemporary abstracts with them because watercolors always have that sense of wonder when you do wet on wet like nothing else does. My little travel watercolor palette has been on all my bike tours, in all my travels, so it's been to seven continents now. Hardly dented, right? It's been modified somewhat, but it's been my companion.” He tries to open it, but this permanent watercolor set that he tries to show via Zoom, he had closed while wet, so it is—for the moment—a silver tin that is stuck shut. I laugh but imagine its colors.

Most of the couple’s bike tour routes were based on the mapping research provided by the Adventure Cycling Association, a non-profit bike touring advocacy group based in Missoula, Montana. The ACA’s monthly magazine even did a feature article on the couple, in recognition of their support for travel by bicycle. In addition to Nard’s abstract work, he’s known for his bicycle painting series; one of his large-scale mixed media paintings of traveling cyclists adorns a wall at the ACA headquarters.

Now in their 70’s, and post-COVID, the couple’s means for their treks changed somewhat when they acquired a camper van with a bicycle rack. Bike travel more customarily involves day trips from the van. “That seems to be a little more comfortable,” chuckled Nard.

Most of Nard’s art is studio work. He spends days sketching and designing how pieces go together, combining four or five photos into a painting. “Pikes Peak may not even look like Pikes Peak to some degree,” he explains. He allows the image and concept to evolve and change, which is one reason why he favors watercolor. “You only nudge it and make value suggestions and it does a lot of the work on its own.” Time stands still throughout the evolutionary process of painting “so unless there’s an alarm or an intention of focus to look at the time, it is an interaction between me and the paint; everything else just falls into the background.” Nard does not favor any one medium or style “because a part of the art for me is exploring who/what I am and how I relate to the world.” This approach inspires a “working meditation and a nudging to become whole.”

Sheary, born and raised in Oregon, moved to Alaska in her mid-20’s and stayed for 35 years, working as an editor and fishing lodge owner among other occupations. By then, already a published novelist, Sheary’s enrollment in the University of Alaska Anchorage MFA Creative Writing program was solicited by then program Director Ron Spatz. Sheary had already completed most of a BA, so it made sense to complete her writing degree at UAA.

She witnessed, over time, however that “It was easier to share visual arts with the public than writing. I was on the staff of Alaska Quarterly Review, and I saw those thousands of unsolicited manuscripts, and all they were hoping for was to get published, let alone receive monetary compensation. Whereas with visual art, you could easily begin getting your work out there with any number of accessible venues, such as the walls of local coffee shops.” She also credits motherhood in her 40s as the impetus for moving from writing and editing to visual arts.

Sheary describes Nard as “a degreed art professional” while she is “self taught. My degrees are in English or writing.”

Like Nard, though, Sheary’s first medium was watercolor. But as a member of the Alaska Watercolor Society, she was exposed to other watermedia paints and soon moved toward acrylics. Then in 2001, she experienced a breakthrough in her artistic journey when she was introduced to the beeswax-based paint medium encaustic through her membership with the Girdwood Center for Visual Arts (GCVA, a local non-profit arts organization that continues to this day). Less than a year later, she was awarded her first solo exhibition when Chris Blankenship of Half Moon Creek Gallery (formerly in midtown Anchorage), asked Sheary to fill a last minute vacancy when the scheduled artist got sick.

By 2007, Sheary had become a premier Alaska encaustic artist and educator. With funding from a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Project Award, a backyard shed was converted into a yearround encaustic studio. As the number of Anchorage encaustic artists multiplied partially via Sheary’s monthly workshops, Sheary founded an Alaska Chapter of the non-profit arts organization, International Encaustic Artists.

In 2011, when her daughter moved to the East Coast for college, Sheary took the leap and joined Nard in Colorado Springs. However, as a gallery-represented artist at Anchorage’s Stephan Fine Arts, she never fully left Alaska behind. Both artists' work is still represented by Stephan’s year-round.

Sheary and Nard share their lives both on the open road and in their studios. They’ve adapted creative outlets to suit their combined interests, including their art forms.

They invited Cirque into their home via Zoom through me and Sandy Kleven. This was the second time Sandy had visited their home. She’s met them twice—Last summer after an opening showing their work at Stephan Fine Arts in Anchorage, Sandy hosted a reception for them in her home. Their work over the years appearing in Cirque makes us feel well acquainted. I’ve followed up through multiple emails from Alaska to Colorado Springs, where not just their Alaskan lives intersected, but, interestingly, several artistic lives from Alaska have—and not entirely through happenstance. A small contingency of Cirque-involved Alaskans—Nard and Sheary, Cirque Editor Mike Burwell, artist/poet Brenda Roper, multimedia artist and writer Monica Devine, artist Monica O'Keefe, and writer Beth Hartley—now make the New Mexico and Colorado areas home, close enough to see one another.

After 20 years living in Anchorage, Brenda relocated to Santa Fe and became an artist in residence at El Zaguan on Canyon Road. Her poetry has been published in Cirque, Ice-Floe, UAA’s Inklings/Understory and Alaska Women Speak Brenda participated in the US Poets in Mexico workshop in Merida, Yucatan in 2010.

Cirque Editor Mike Burwell met Brenda Roper through a long-time friend, Bob Jacobs, who employed her as a guide in McCarthy when he owned St. Elias Alpine Guides. Then a visual artist with her Art MFA from UAA, Brenda knew Sheary as a fellow Anchorage artist and Mike had met Sheary through Brenda. It wasn't until later that Sheary met Nard; Mike met him after he and Sheary were an item and living and creating art in Colorado Springs.

Cirque ’s fortune in picking up these artists began with Sheary and Nard’s visit to Brenda’s home in Santa Fe. Sheary explains, “My memory of Cirque goes back to knowing Mike and Brenda. We all knew each other in Anchorage, and we're friends. Brenda moved out of Alaska first, to Santa Fe. And after I moved down to Colorado, I saw Cirque in her casita. By then, Mike had moved to Taos (NM). Nard and I went down there, and we all confabbed.”

Brenda’s work appeared first in Cirque 2.1 (2010), at which point her bio referred to her as a 20-year Alaskan “Living her creative life” and “reinventing herself on one coast or another.” But, by 2011, Brenda’s bio noted she had “moved to the oldest artist colony on Canyon Road in Santa Fe, painting large, writing small, and taking photos to mark her path.”

Nard: “Part of convincing Sheary to move down to Springs was the promise of building her a bigger studio. We now share a converted two-car garage, a space about 30 by 30. I installed cabinets, tables on wheels (from remnants from Habitat for Humanity), and exhaust fans for her encaustic work. We work together quite well. We sort of divided the space up half and half, and sometimes we stick to our own half, and sometimes we move into the other person’s space, depending on who has the next show to install, but we don't growl too much. It's obvious that we influence each other in both our style, which is primarily abstract, and our color palettes. We've had a number of two-person shows, and people always exclaim how beautifully our work hangs together.”

Cirque began to publish Sheary’s first images in Cirque 5:2 solstice 2014 with her three encaustic pieces “Beyond,” “Enterprise,” and “Navigator: Beginning.” The next issue showcased five of Sheary’s pieces, and the next had six and the next five, one of which was a collaborative piece with Nard titled “Switchback.” The pattern continued. By issue 8.1, 2016, Nard and Sheary had multiple pieces in Cirque and a true partnership of visual illustration emerged with the journal.

By 10.1, 2019, the Letter from the Editors from both Sandra and Mike mentioned “Artists whose style impacts most issues as Jim Thiele, Sheary Clough Suiter, Nard Claar, Kim Davis, Brenda Roper, Monica O'Keefe, Matt Witt, Robert Bharda, Jill Johnson, and many more.”

Beyond Cirque, Nard and Sheary interact with local art organizations and nonprofits, as well. Sheary explained: “There's a refurbished art deco building in downtown Colorado Springs where a group of nonprofits have come together to form the Philanthropy Collective. Because their offices are full of art by local artists, they began opening the space to the public by doing a First Friday Art Walk event every six months. They invited Nard and I to give the inaugural artist talk. It’s a real honor to be showing our work there, placed by a local curatorial service, Curate Your Art.

“There are two adjacent galleries in downtown Springs–Kreuser Gallery, and G44 Gallery—owned by Abigail Kreuser and Gundega Stevens, respectively—who jointly have the art placement business called Curate Your Art. They’re the ones responsible for curating the art at the Philanthropy Collective, which houses some of the nonprofits that we support. It’s like multiplying the exposure in many, many ways. Nard, in particular, is very active in supporting local nonprofits, such as Food to Power, Concrete Couch, and Trails and Open Space (each of which have an active web presence). Anything to do with the environment particularly.

Sheary explained “I’m stepping into using my art for activism to encourage questioning and discussion among viewers regarding issues that matter to me sociopolitically. I've had two successful solo installations thus far that have redirected the focus of my artwork. The most recent one was titled ‘The Clothes We Wear,’ bringing attention to the ills of the fast fashion industry, both environmentally and labor wise. As consumers, we buy and discard without conscious regard to the ways in which our actions affect the environment or the welfare of the laborers who make those clothes. Many of the pieces in that show represent a move to take my work off the wall. They included wax and textile suspended sculptures utilizing deconstructed clothing that creates shape and form. I offered a handout listing ten easy ways to take action on an individual basis, such as mending and buying clothing secondhand.”

Because Sheary is from a literary background, it comes as little surprise that Sheary’s influences in art are based in artists’ words rather than their work. When Nard and Sheary met at the conference in Taos, she had just been awarded her first Encaustic solo exhibition at Alaska Pacific University’s Carr-Gottstein Gallery (now the Leah J. Peterson Gallery). During a mixed media slideshow presentation by artist/ instructor Katherine Chang Liu, Sheary felt like she'd been struck by a lightning bolt when she heard Liu reciting a quote by Georgia O'Keeffe.

Describing her retreat to New Mexico from New York City in the 1920s, O’Keeffe said, “I went to strip away what I had been taught, to accept as true my own thinking. This was one of the best times of my life. There was no one to satisfy but myself.” Sheary keeps an abbreviated copy of these words on her office wall, a daily reminder to never let the outside world define her or her art.

Awards recognizing Sheary’s expertise in encaustic include a Permanent Collection Purchase by the Anchorage Museum of Art, a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Project Award, an International Encaustic Artists Project Grant, and an Alaska State Council on the Arts Career Opportunity Grant, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Beyond Nard and Sheary’s travels nationally, their shared international adventures include a 2016 month-long artist residency in Listowel, Ireland at the Olive Stack Gallery. Sheary and Nard remember fondly the close connections in Listowel, where they were “looked at not as strangers passing through, but as members of the community.” The “Tidy Town” of Listowel (a sought-after national Irish distinction) is completely walkable in all directions in 10 minutes or less. Beyond running the art gallery, their days consisted of morning walks in the town’s “Garden of Europe,” a peaceful memorial to the foibles of war along with cool evenings and the joy of good Irish whiskey while chatting and listening to sessions in the pubs, and weekends devoted to offering workshops to locals grateful for the opportunity to learn and interact with ‘Yankees.’

We are grateful for their travels, their social consciousness and their art within the pages of Cirque .