Susan M. Wadsworth, Rindge NH and Shushan, NY April 16, 2021
The use of shape may be one of the more unique aspects of my art. My shape is not a specific object or mountain; instead it is a personal abstraction of the landscape. It is not simply a mountain but a shape that evolves from the landscape and into the artist (viewer) and then back into the landscape.
I think back to college and my obsession with the rounded reflections of wine bottles in mirrors. My work was a little like that of Janet Fish, but not as accomplished.
When I attended Cranbrook Academy of Art outside of Detroit in 1979, I was probably the least sophisticated of the students. I knew the least about contemporary art history, and our painting professor, George Ortman, told me to go to New York and look at recent art. Luckily, my aunt lived on East 80th Street, just blocks from the Met. So I began looking at art in museums there as well as the galleries in Soho and along 57th Street.
In 1989, by the time I received my second masters in art history from Tufts, I had made up for that art historical deficit. And as I taught more and more interdisciplinary and global courses at Fitchburg State, I learned even more. Now the tense planes of Cubist space and the use of fluid kanji (Japanese calligraphy) inform many of my pieces.
Yet the strong sense of a rounded shape remains in my work. When I outline these shapes in pencil (or more lately in ink), to give more definition than pastel can alone, the abstraction often becomes dominant.
This obsessive shape comes from the rounded hills of southern Vermont along the border with New York state. This is where my parents retired in 1971, and even now when I bring artist friends to this spot, they understand exactly where my art comes from. The 500 to 1000 foot mountains wrap that around the Battenkill River in just this location, are always changing their colors, light and shapes from season to season, and even from day to day.
I also feel that rounded shape within my body. After training in the martial arts for a decade or so, I still feel that connection to my “center,” and lately in my artwork I feel this center emerge even more strongly into that primary shape in my work.
Several years ago, I did a work called Fog Clearing Sunset. This is derived, like many of my winter pieces, from skiing and ski instructing at Crotched Mountain in southern NH. I had actually experienced these exact layers of pink clouds in this work. At the top of the mountain, the pink clouds lay beneath me, until I skied through and below them. In the drawing, somehow a nuggat-like shape evolved on the left, and I let it stay. It almost looks like a head, or a tipped being, with an opening below that flows into the rest of the landscape. I felt it was a “nuggat” of learning, of trying to become a better skier, as if this little part of my being knew more than I did and if I just trusted it, I could be better.
Since then I’ve been moving in other directions as well, distracted by the use of ink kanji (more about this in a future blog). But in my latest pieces (Route 100 and Winter Meadow), still in progress at this time, that shape has become much bigger in works that are also bigger—up to 6 or 7 feet wide. This shape seems to be a way to insert myself, and my center, into the landscape, and to feel the world, and life, opening up as a response.