There are so many parallels between Mexican life and traditions—I should say Oaxacan life, as Oaxaca is to DF what Montana is to NY—and the Catholic traditions I was raised with, that they always fire up my pen. I wrestle with the yin and yang of the quinceañera tradition–so beautiful that this transition is acknowledged, honored, ritualized; so maddening that the future it predicts is so limited. The quinceañera, the wedding, the validation of one’s spouse and legitimization of oneself through childbearing…and one’s role in the world is complete.

These pieces in La Loteria Mia series look back at the decades that followed, for me, once I stepped off that Catholic gameboard. I wish I had done it with kindness (to myself and others) and integrity, but especially in the earliest years of re-invention, I think I was a little cruel, fighting a battle for that version of myself I wanted to define…and that probably had no other enemy–certainly no greater enemy–than myself…

La Veintañera–The Twenties

The world beyond Montana was a wonderland, a banquet laid out for my consumption, as ripe, vibrant, and sexy as I was…bold, cocky, exposed, certain there were no limitations I could not find my way over, through, or around…an emotional adventure, a circus in which I was ring-master, trapeze artist, and caged animal all at once…

La Treintañera–The Thirties

I was into my thirties by the time I came to the understanding that raw talent was only half the picture—maybe less—and that anyone could learn to do anything, you just had to access the lessons and take the classes…down to business, work, work, work…I had enough living behind me to have some weight; enough ahead of me to believe I could move mountains…enough vision, strength, and self-knowledge to actually move them…through work, work, work…

La Cuarentañera–The Forties

In my forties, I stepped out. Out of the work, work, work–at least work for money, and work for other people (certainly I’ve worked as hard to teach myself to paint and build a body of work); out of my country; out of my roles–my job description, my history, my community, my possessions and mementos–and therefore out of my definition; out of my language. I stepped away from tragedy. I returned to the creative, but in an art form I didn’t know. I embraced not “knowing how” and the pleasure of finding my own way through—observing, experimenting, practicing, hitting the wall, leaving it until I knew what to do next—stumbling through painting, which was at first a comfort, and then an even deeper fire that seared me to the bone, burned the drama off like ether and left me essential and committed.

The Fifties

The financial crisis, re-entry into the “straight world” workplace, and the commencement of my fifties all coincided. I have some thoughts about what that reflection will look like…and a new card is on the way…but I am holding off until the end of this decade to sum up La Cincuentañera…and hoping very much that what has begun with so much dark will be required by physics, if nothing else, to balance itself out with an equal, or at least substantial, measure of light.

The American Woman Triptych was one of my first paintings. The line drawing and a first pass at underpainting were in place when I went to Oaxaca in 2001. When I came back, I picked it up again, though my painting had evolved a lot in that year, and I wasn’t sure where to go with it. Didn’t want to start completely over, though my skills at “verisimilitude” had improved–but it was what it was, the best I could do at that time. And I liked the freedom, the unconcern for accuracy, the greater focus on story…so I painted it up and let it live that way for some time.

It’s been out for a couple of showings since then, but I don’t think I was ever fully satisfied with it. Then this October, Jacqueline Cooper of Autobody Fine Art, and the Artistic Director of Hayward’s Sun Gallery, asked for some of my Mexico-influenced work for a show, and I started thinking on this piece again…what it was intended to express, the rightness of Mexican imagery for the base-line realities of living, and also about graphic story-telling. So I transformed the faces into calavera masks related to the roles in a woman’s life represented in the piece. And then I decided to take the graphic element further, flirting with a color version of the  “Notan” concept, outlining the figures as in a comic book–which my sisters and I grew up on…and I think it’s creeping towards satisfactory at last…

and she’s done… for now.

The Flirt

The Hostess

The Professional

Though the Fates did gift me a precious change-up in 2005. I was in Montana for a short visit to do some work for my sister and her husband, expected to return well before Christmas. But weather closed the airports, and the first flight back was after the holiday. So I sat in their kitchen, night after night, researching, drawing and coloring cards for the whole family, as Lars and Rhiannon draped over the table or perched on a chair for a vulture’s eye view of work in progress. And finally, Tia Susana was not Echo’s mommy or tall, blonde, indulgent Aunty Bert…Tia Susana was the one who made the cards.

This year, Rhiannon fell in love with The Tiger Saga books, she started playing softball and the family made it back to her favorite place on earth, Clalock Beach on the Olympic Peninsula.

Since I’ve been asking the kids about their year and what they want in their own cards (as opposed to asking their parents), Lars has embraced the possibilities with hilarious gusto–his shy reserve has completely evaporated. He imagines detailed scenarios–and thank the gods, he’s started giving me URL’s for the specifics–this year it was Nerf Vortex Blasters. Last year was an epic adventure, fueled by Leggo Atlantis; this year it’s an epic battle.

The amphibian obsession continues; he’s still into salamanders, and quite specific that he wanted an army of ten salamanders (ok, I let him down a bit), four Blue Dumpy Tree Frogs, led by a Japanese Giant Salamander, armed with all four styles of Nerf Vortex Blasters, at war with a “little green frog with a spray can of glitter–a Glitter Warrior!” His dad thinks he got that from his last visit to San Francisco. (Snap! Little does he know!)

This year Echo said she wanted to be a blue Amazonian butterfly, she wanted to be on a multiple trapeze, as this is her new love, and she wanted to be listening to her new lime green iPod, which she is very proud to have purchased with her own earnings. (Hmmm, maybe I should apply for her job?)

Rhiannon at 12, Lars and Echo at 9, captured, ever so slightly, in 2011. With lots of love from Tia Susana.

please open the holiday season

with some wine,

some nature-inspired art (which some would also call gifts)

of the two- and three-dimensional kind,

and a bit o’ fellowship

…nos vemos en Claudia’s, eh?

Reception this Saturday for group show, Hot Color of Culture, at the Sun Gallery, in Hayward. A lovely show, curated by the lovely Jacqueline Cooper of Autobody FineArt.

Music, dance, food and drink in a family-friendly community center…and I’ll be there!

Artwork will be onsite through Sunday, August 14. ADS Hats is going to be taking a hiatus thereafter, so most hats in the store are marked down to reduce inventory. A fabulous opportunity to indulge!

Hope to see you there!

Susana Montana

If you stayed in the Bay Area for the 4th of July weekend, you’re in luck! I will take 15% off any artwork at ADS Hats this Sunday. Elina is also offering a broad selection of hats at 30-50% off, with an additional 20% off many styles, this weekend only. Come get a hat for the sun and artwork for the soul!

                                                                                                                                                       –Abrazotes, Amiguitas/os!

About the piece:

MY BOOTS HANG THERE follows an image-thread through the geography of my life. Much of my upbringing in Montana was spent on my grandparents’ farm, and my first encounter with a decomposing skeleton has always stuck with me. My grandmother handled the bones—and my horror—with an easy combination of respect and irreverence, telling me we were all headed for the same place, so there was no point in being afraid of it. Years later, I recognized in Mexican art a kindred mix of the sacred and profane, and it provided my entrée into art. The painting included here is from a series called Bone Women: The Taunting Embrace of Life as an Artist. It draws from the Mexican alignment of life and death, each always viewed in the context of the other, with boldness, mockery, wit and empathy.  In the first decade of my life as an artist, I literally carried my artwork—and what little else I had left—on my back between Oaxaca and San Francisco. This piece is an homage to Frida Kahlo’s My Dress Hangs There—an ode to the foreignness, exoticism, and perspective of the outsider.

Salud!

Bone Bonsai Pine

Matte, Bone & Light: The Skeleton Trees

 I am originally from Montana, a Republican-leaning state with minimal social and cultural infrastructure (I like to say, that which doesn’t kill you becomes your nickname), but abundant access to nature. I grew up with a luxury of unstructured time—hours, sometimes days—to observe the form, texture, taste, smell and grit, the luminosity and threat of the natural world at hand. Today, living a frenetic urban life with little opportunity to linger, this artwork is, for me, a meditation on that interaction with the natural world.

The Meditations on Trees are a departure from my usual painting, which wrangles with archetypes, religion, politics and history, the role and experience of women. Because I consider nature to be its own best representation, I have questioned how it can be recounted, how the ineffable can be captured on a flat artwork with mere tools. Yet my heart frequently aches with noise and pressure and work. I am estranged from the deep silence, the calm and intense attention the natural world induces, and I need a totem to call up that peace in the physical space in which my modern life is conducted.

Trees evoke an innate empathy in me. As with people, they are most poignant naked. In their skin I see thirst. I see the same attempt at self-protection, the same vulnerability and revelation of age and experience as my own. I want to lay hands on bark to exchange sympathy and knowledge, as I want to hold my nephew when he’s sick, my mentor’s aging hand as he declines.  In the frames of trees, I find the same evolutionary strategies—scale for stability, brevity for flexibility—as I see in my own line, our literal skeletons and figurative roots having a powerful say in what we may become.  And I see that central quality that belongs to trees alone, and is essential to the meditation: same place-ness. We are always in motion—from work to work, task to task, commitment to commitment. Trees are planted in the earth, in one place, until they topple. Whatever movement trees possess, their dance is with the light and life surrounding and moving through them. The signs of their seasons, scars, starvations and survival are visible in how they twist and grow, beautiful or strange, undisguised and informative.

The new pieces for ADS Hats explore the very particular quality of San Francisco’s fog-dispersed light.  The art term “matte”—defined as a smooth surface free from shine or highlights, with a rough or granular quality—strikes me as the perfect description for a certain kind of Bay Area sky. Several of these pieces seek to capture those grey-violet skies—seemingly flat, but with an enveloping presence of light behind the haze—and the acute etching of tree forms against them, seemingly black, but never actually anything so simple.

I have included previous work, which also plays between light, form and texture. The Bone pieces layer various papers and applications of paint to achieve a dry, tactile roughness that recalls bark, bones, or aging skin. The Light pieces manipulate layers and combinations of reflective and non-reflective paint—and sometimes paper—to mimic the radiance of light held within a living latticework of branches. Some play with the depth of field so that outlines change character dramatically in different light, as do trees in their natural setting.

These artworks attempt to capture the consoling spirit, the aesthetic imbalance, and the full recall and value of a marvelous living thing. It is a paradox of art that we employ mechanical processes to simulate that which is utterly ephemeral. And yet I embrace that impossible pursuit, taking comfort both in the process and the progeny.

Early artwork can be seen at susanmurdoch.com. To see current work, find my Artist page on Facebook under Montana Murdoch Artwork, or for a short time longer, Susana Montana Murdoch Artist page.