D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
December
2008
A Stitch in Time
Silver City artist Susan Szajer has it all sewn up at her gallery, Yello on Yankie.
By Donna Clayton Lawder
"I say that I paint with fabric and I draw with thread. I think that's the best way to describe my work," says Silver City artist Susan Szajer (pronounced SHY-er). "If you say that the pieces are framed quilts, or quilts under glass, people think of traditional quilts. They don't get an accurate impression of what it is. They think of squares and those traditional patterns," she adds, pointing out one of her trademark landscape pieces, "Moonlit Melody." Szajer laughs. "As you can see, it's not that!"
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Susan Szajer in her Yello on Yankie
gallery, with one of her larger abstract "dimensional" pieces. |
Indeed, not.
With nary a quilt square, the piece is more like a painting, showing slender, elegant trees amid freeform swaths of purple and gold landscape, a shimmering sky behind them. The trees' dark trunks are like the sparest of line drawings, made from tight, zigzag stitches, their tiny glittering leaves several tones of sparkling gold.
The piece is one of several landscape works adorning a wall at Yello on Yankie, the gallery Szajer owns with her husband, Gerry Szajer, an artist who works in metal.
The pair moved from Canaan, NY, to Silver City three and a half years ago.
"He had visited his mother in Phoenix and decided to see what was around," Szajer says of her husband. "He saw the Gila National Forest (on a map) and decided that Silver City would be a good base to explore the area. So, he spent a few days here and he called me and says, 'You know, I think you'd really like this place.'" She pauses, then adds with a warm smile, "He was right."
When she first came to town, Szajer showed her work at artist Casey Luria's Bloomin' Gourdworks gallery. She says, "It was a great place for my work to land here, in Silver City."
The couple opened their gallery, Yello on Yankie, in Silver City's downtown art district two years ago this March.
Though Szajer has been in many juried shows, she says she especially appreciates the freedom of showing exclusively now in her own gallery. "One of the reasons I wanted my own space is to be able to do any type of work that I want. When doing juried shows, an artist is juried in with a particular type of work and is not allowed to exhibit other things. For example, if I were juried in with the embroidered landscapes, I would not be able to show dimensional work. This space allows me to show the entire range of my art, and anything new that I may develop."
A seamstress for many years, Szajer turned to quilting in 1976, at first creating traditional log-cabin patterns. "I wasn't satisfied with that and so I started experimenting with fabric and design," she says. "I dye my own fabrics so that I can get the color palette I want. Sometimes I can't finish a piece until I go dye another swatch of fabric that's the exact color and effect I'm looking for!"
To get the customized effect she desires in her stitching, Szajer uses a regular sewing machine in a freewheeling fashion.
"Sometimes I am asked if I use an embroidery machine to do the embroidery. I don't. I use a regular sewing machine, lower the feed dogs and remove the presser foot, so that the fabric doesn't move," she says. "I then move the fabric where I want to stitch, side to side and front to back. By using this free-motion embroidery technique, I can make the stitches as long as I want, or pile them on top of each other to add dimension."
She points out the stitching in another piece, some of the stitches over an inch long, others so micro-tight they appear like a brushstroke.
Szajer's work ranges from representational images to abstract, even within the landscape genre. Hanging near "Moonlit Melody" is another landscape work, "Calypso." Though the piece also features trees — a favorite subject of Szajer's — these are more abstract forms, their leaves and branches more implied than drawn out, suggested in sweeping arcs. The effect is less like literal trees, more like fanciful billowing umbrellas, perhaps, giving a playful feeling of movement of air through the branches.
In the next row of works, the images go to pure abstractionism, with bold blocks of color stitched with shimmering gold. In one, "Deceleration," the hand-dyed background fabric is a swirl of golden browns, looking like painted silk. Red squares are set within multi-hued boxes of browns, blues, oranges and greens. Electric-blue bars of fabric pierce through and overlay the squares within squares. Threads in nearly neon hues are stitched across the canvas in loose squiggles, uniting the two larger square images with a lone panel of vibrant sky-blue at the border. The piece seems to vibrate with energy.
Szajer says she likes to go back and forth from more representational images to the bold abstract — and that her audience and the local buying public does the same.
"When I was in Chicago, I sold more abstracts. It's a more contemporary market. I sold more representational pieces in New York," she says. "Here, I am selling more abstract pieces again, and that surprises me, but I do sell the representational landscapes, too."
Szajer recently has branched out in a new direction, into what she calls "dimensional" work. These larger canvases, ranging from 18-by-48 inches to 32-by-40 inches, are boldly abstract and three-dimensional, with colorful fabric items and fringy threads standing out from the background canvas. She holds up a large square piece, its center bedecked with skinny rolls of fabric wrapped in brilliant, satiny threads. They resemble firecrackers, with little fringy tufts of fluffy, golden threads down the center giving the impression of snapping little explosions.
The wide border framing the central square image radiates from gold to orange to deep crimson at the edges, bringing out the red tones in the center of the work. The border, Szajer explains, is made from torn canvas strips, stitched together, then gessoed and painted.
Szajer also creates more "standard" paintings, working in acrylics, often adding bits of metal, hardware and nail heads for a 3-D effect.
"I love turn-screws," she says, pointing out a painting with four of the metal bits grouped in one corner of the work. With a golden-orange background and reddish circles — like rings left by a wineglass, perhaps — the image is playful, serene, spare.
She also incorporates metal bits — pretty little scraps from her husband's work with metal — and is especially fond of the bands and strips of patina-ed copper his work affords her.
Szajer says she goes back and forth between creating quilted works and others that are "pure painting."
"I alternate between the two; one gives me a break from the other," she says, then adds with a laugh, "It's good for my head! Painting helps me let go of the quilting, and vice versa." She also creates quilted pillows in a variety of color palettes, stitching abstract lines and leaf images, essentially creating smaller, decor-oriented versions of her framed works. These, she says, make good gifts — affordable and portable, they are bought by both locals and tourists alike.
Having worked with fabric for decades and exhibited and sold her work in several different parts of the country, Szajer reflects on the change in the way fabric art is accepted and appreciated.
"There used to be the question of whether something like this was craft or if it was art," she says. "When you look at what people are doing with fabric and fiber now, it's a whole different thing and it's appreciated differently, too. That boundary is now gone."
Szajer says she is especially rewarded by the simple, tactile and visual pleasures of working with fabric, and that color is the driving force behind her desire to create her art.
"I'm a real color person," she says. With a sweeping gesture of her hand, from her heart outward, she adds, "I love warm! I love creating things that bring a feeling, that create an atmosphere.
"To me, it's all about color. That's why I dye my own fabric — it gives me such pleasure. I like to say that dyeing is 50 percent skill and 50 percent happenstance. I have an idea and I go for that, but then there are the factors of the dye, the fabric, how it takes the color."
She runs her finger over that batik-silken-looking sky behind the trees in "Moonlit Melody," describing how the wetness and quality of the fabric took the dye in glorious and unexpected ways.
She smiles and says, "Sometimes I get surprised."