Im 19 and I Still Dont Have an Art Style
Creative person'south Questionnaire
An Artist Who Makes Paintings Without a Canvas
Ahead of a new solo bear witness, Suzanne Jackson talks about her artistic routine, her dearest of jazz music and the worst studio she ever had.
The painter Suzanne Jackson at her habitation in Savannah, Ga. Credit... Peter Frank Edwards
Suzanne Jackson isn't fond of the term "overachiever," though you wouldn't be wrong to phone call her ane. At 75, she has had a long, storied, multi-hyphenate career as a painter, poet, dancer, teacher, curator and theater designer. She's not a fan of the word "career" either: "It'south my life's work," she says. "There'southward just a lot of things to exist interested in." Jackson traces that attitude back to her childhood in 1940s and '50s pre-statehood Alaska, where a sure pioneering spirit prevailed. "We just did things," she remembers. She went to college at San Francisco State University at 17, studying art, drama and trip the light fantastic; toured South America as a ballerina; and in 1967, moved to Los Angeles, where she tooled effectually town in a Buick Hearse, took cartoon classes from Charles White, began showing her paintings at the influential Ankrum gallery and, in 1968, opened Gallery 32, the community-minded space she ran out of her studio virtually MacArthur Park for two years. There, she hosted exhibitions by emerging black artists like David Hammons and Betye Saar, equally well equally a fund-raiser for the Black Panthers. Every bit a single female parent in her 40s with her son in tow, she earned a graduate degree in theater design at Yale, worked on productions with the Kennedy Middle and the Berkeley Repertory Theater and somewhen settled in Georgia in the mid-90s to teach at the Savannah College of Art and Design. She has now lived and worked in the city for two decades, in a rambling, three-story, double-wide 1890s business firm that she owns in the historic Starland district.
Though she has made paintings since she was a child, and exhibited since the belatedly 1960s, Jackson has had something of a banner year. In June, she mounted a career survey at Savannah'south Telfair Museums; in September, she won a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation; and this month, she opens a solo bear witness at Ortuzar Projects in Lower Manhattan, an exhibition that focuses on her boundary-pushing recent work: otherworldly, dimensional paintings equanimous entirely of acrylic paint — with no canvas below — embedded with bits of household detritus and personal ephemera.
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Jackson first began using acrylics during her years in Los Angeles, later her car was broken into and her oil paints stolen. She initially deployed it almost similar watercolor, setting down layer upon layer of washy paint to build up dreamy images of black figures commingling with birds, flowers and hearts. In more contempo decades, her art has become abstract and more driven by materials. During the years she worked every bit a theater designer, Jackson began incorporating discarded bogus paper — the sheeting used to protect a stage while painting sets — into her increasingly textural surfaces. Then it was leftover deer netting from her garden, ballet netting from her costume designs and produce bags and forest salvaged from renovating her business firm. Eventually she figured out that she could put pigment down directly onto a table covered in plastic, and then peel it up and hang the drying flick as her sheet, allowing her to pigment acrylic straight onto acrylic. The issue, which looks delicate but is not — "you can kick it, stomp on it, information technology's not going to be harmed," says Jackson — blurs the line between painting and sculpture. Upcycling remains central to her process. She even peels the paint from her hands and stores the dried flakes for future use. In this fashion, her synthetic medium "becomes organic," she explains, "considering I'm reintegrating pigment that would go into nature and destroy it."
When we speak over the telephone in late October, Jackson has just come inside afterward trying to help a butterfly with a cleaved wing that got caught in her screen door. She bemoans the gentrification that'due south irresolute her leafy neighborhood, the interlopers who seem intent on cutting down copse and installing newfangled businesses, like a shipping-container food court that, she says, "looks like a prison." (Not all the neighbors are so terrible: At the brewery across the street, the proprietors named a beer in her honor — "Ms. Suzanne," a Guinness-like batter that's best served in a vino glass.) Her own home sits on three lots, her backyard lush with pomegranate copse, grape vines, woodpeckers, turtles, feral cats, possums, raccoons and snakes. "Everyone wants it, but they're not going to have information technology," Jackson says of the holding. She chuckles. "That's just the fashion it is." Sitting in one of her studio rooms on the west side of the building, her viii-year-old Siamese, Lexi, on her lap, she answers T's creative person's questionnaire.
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What is your mean solar day like? How much do you lot sleep? What is your work schedule?
Terminal dark, I didn't get to bed until two. Sometimes I tin wake up at 4. I listen to NPR until 8 in the morning. My sleeping accommodation is on the second flooring, so I come downstairs and through the studio to meet what I'chiliad doing. And I may end upwards climbing a ladder to work on something before I get around to the kitchen to have a cup of java or some breakfast. Then I have to feed all the cats. I come up dorsum into the studio and fiddle effectually some more than earlier I go dressed. I work less at present at night. My neighborhood is very noisy at dark, most like a circus with all these clubs and parties.
How many hours of creative work do you lot practise in a day?
All day long. If I'm not physically putting pigment on something, I'yard writing or reading, thinking about information technology. And even when I'1000 supposed to be sleeping, I'm thinking about what I'm going to do, how I'grand going to achieve a structural idea, what should the title be, what's next. And then, because I don't have assistants, I'1000 besides having to recall nigh the calendar, the schedule of things going on. Sometimes I think I really should accept an assistant, only I make my work so that I tin can get up on the ladder and take information technology downward. I believe my hand should be in the work, and not somebody else'south, unless I want to share the credit with them.
What is the worst studio you ever had?
Physically the worst studio might exist my very first one, for $40 a month on Temple Street in Los Angeles. It was like a storefront on the front of a beautiful Victorian firm. I had to put a parachute over my bed because there were holes in the floor from the house upstairs, and the kids would throw lilliputian pebbles downward. I just remember my mother and father sitting there, my dad in his suit, my female parent in her nice little wearing apparel, similar, "What has happened to our girl?" To me, that wasn't a bad studio. Information technology was my kickoff studio, and information technology was really wonderful.
What is the first work yous ever sold, and for how much?
That was a slice that I sold at the Laguna Beach art museum in 1968 for $300. I call back it was called "Gypsy Girl." Information technology was a watercolor. I take a feeling that when they had the fires in Laguna Beach, that painting could have been destroyed. I don't even know who bought it.
When you start a new piece, where do y'all brainstorm? What is the first step?
Sometimes I'yard working on three or four things at a time. 1 or 2 pieces may be cartoon, and then I'm working on something else. Sometimes it's just, put down the brush stroke or a big palette knife on something, then see what happens. Walk away and come back. Try to be focused, so endeavour to exist unfocused.
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How exercise yous know when yous're done with a piece?
With these new pieces that are pure acrylic, I spotter to run into where the stress is. Maybe at that place are places where the pigment is thinner, or the weight of the pigment may pull. Sometimes I'll go back, but commonly the slice just tells me that it doesn't want to be touched anymore.
What music do you play when you're making fine art?
Lots of jazz. I used to commencement with Yo-Yo Ma in the morning time, and so it would evolve into jazz, then maybe by 3 in the morn it would be Jimi Hendrix. I met [the Savannah radio veteran] Ike Carter, and in 2013, we started this grouping, bringing in music that nosotros similar for a radio program ["Heed Hear," hosted by Savannah State University Radio]. He'south kind of a maestro of blues and African-American classical music.
Is at that place a meal you eat on repeat when you're working?
My lazy food is a veggie burger. I like actually grainy Ezekiel or spelt bread, and then I put on tomatoes and lettuce. I grew up with Miracle Whip instead of mayo, and the strongest grainy mustard. That's my fast food. With a glass of wine, mayhap.
Are yous bingeing on any shows right now?
I dear "Poldark." That'southward my Sunday night splurge.
What is the weirdest object in your studio?
Probably me? This is an odd building. On the tertiary floor on the east side there'due south a sign that says "This Room is Haunt" [sic]. Ane 24-hour interval, this human being came by in a truck and said, "I used to alive in that house when I was a niggling boy, and we wrote a sign considering we thought that room was haunted." So that's left over.
What's the last thing that made you cry?
I was at the dentist the morning that the Joan Mitchell Foundation called. When I got domicile, there was an email from them. I'm so used to getting rejection notes. When I opened it upwards, I couldn't believe it. I call back I just said, "Oh my God," and broke out in tears. Before that, the last fourth dimension I really cried was when my son passed abroad unexpectedly [in 2016, of congestive middle failure]. And then I couldn't cry very long because all his friends were there, and I had to console them. But I broke out in tears when I realized I had actually, for the first fourth dimension in my life, won a real grant with coin fastened. I just sabbatum there crying all past myself.
What do you bulk buy with about frequency?
As presently as I got my grant money, I ordered v gallon buckets of acrylic medium from Nova Color in California. I too buy 60 pounds of cat food on a regular schedule. And bird feed. I have subscriptions for that, and I have a subscription for wine. That'due south my other matter.
Practice you exercise, other than climbing up and down ladders?
Well, I accept a lot of steps to sew and downwardly. I was a dancer, and I was really toned. I think the final time I danced was when I taught mod trip the light fantastic in 1994. People don't seem to trip the light fantastic anymore, even social dancing. They only stand and hoot and holler. They don't movement. I tin can't forgive myself for not being as toned equally I was when I was younger, when I weighed 105 pounds and hadn't had a baby. It's role of being a woman: You abound up and yous have a body. I've become less unforgiving about information technology, just I'one thousand still always trying to breathe in. Sometimes in the morning when I wake upwardly I attempt to stretch in bed, which is adulterous.
What are y'all reading right now?
Aberjhani, who wrote a poem for my Telfair catalog, has a book called "Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah." That'south the one I've read recently. I just bought this large volume of George Herriman's "Krazy Kat." I said I was not going to buy any more than books at my age, but I had to take that one, because that's how I learned to read. And I recall the social commentary may accept subconsciously influenced my life.
What's your favorite artwork by someone else?
Oh, that'southward then difficult! I love Mary Lovelace O'Neal's paintings. Ruth Asawa is another of my favorites. We were on the California Arts Council together. Mary Corse. Her work is and then subtle. Senga Nengudi. It'south really hard. You know the cartoon that really affected me when I commencement saw it? The one by Charles White of a woman with books spread out on the table. Of course he was my teacher. I love Lee Bontecou's work. And Augusta Savage. In that location are only so many lovely things in the world, and people who help you to think and see. You lot tin can't just choose i.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
"Suzanne Jackson: News!" is on view from Nov. 21, 2019, through January. 25, 2020, at Ortuzar Projects, 9 White Street, New York, ortuzarprojects.com.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/19/t-magazine/suzanne-jackson-artist.html
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