QSOS with Susan Shie

Karen Musgrave (KM): I’m doing a Quilters’ S.O.S. – Save Our Stories interview with Susan Shie by e-mail since we cannot be together to do the interview and we wanted very much to include her in the project. It is October 1, 2006. Susan, thank you so much. Tell me about the quilt you selected for this interview.

Susan Shie (SS): This is my painted diary quilt “Wilma (Peace Voodoo),” which I started on October 20, 2005 and finished on Nov 7 that year. It’s 66.5″ height x 66.5″ width, drawn and colored with airbrush, written on with airpen, and crazy grid machine sewn, with one row of hand stitching around the edge and one Green Temple Buddha Boy bead in the bottom left corner. There is even more about this piece on my site at http://www.turtlemoon.com/gallery3/wilma-full.htm.

The actual Hurricane Wilma started up around October 16, 2005, four days before I began this piece. It was terrible to think that she would develop into another huge hurricane, after what we’d been through already that Fall, or rather what the Gulf States had been through, with Katrina and then Rita. But there she was, and she ended up being even bigger, bigger than any Atlantic hurricane ever on record. We had more hurricanes in 2005 than ever before on record, too, with Wilma tying the 1933 record, and Beta taking us into the dubious glory of the lead. I had made my big piece “Katrina Blues” in September, and now it seemed my work was going to be about hurricanes for a while, but I couldn’t think of much else. None of us could. Well, war, too.

The only good thing I can say about Wilma is that she didn’t hit the same places that the earlier hurricanes had. She did wreck Cosumel and the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico though, ripping it up there for over a full day of terrible damage. She affected Haiti and Cuba, and then she roared across southern Florida, leaving those people without electric or gasoline for a long time. Jeb Bush promised Florida that they were ready for Wilma, that they didn’t have to worry about being left stranded but it happened again, for whatever reasons.

Meanwhile, back in my personal life, I decided to make this piece about the four generations of women in my family: Mom, me, my daughter Gretchen, and my granddaughter Eva, and to show us like Russian stacking dolls. Only it’s hard to do that with bodies sitting in Buddha girl positions, which is how I wanted us to be. So we’re kinda stacked, looking more like a Buddha totem pole. We ended up with saucepans on our heads, and the men in our lives are with us, plus Gretchen’s cat Isis, since Eva doesn’t have a beau yet. She did get the Croup during the making of my Wilma piece though.

I put a gigantic St Quilta the Comforter standing on the right side of the piece, to balance the stack of Shie women. St Q has two heads where her breasts would be, but at first I didn’t know who I wanted them to be. That’s rare, as I usually know who everyone is, when I draw a piece. I finally decided they’re my dear friend YaYa Pat and her mother Mary, who were both very sick last Fall. Pat had some mysterious thing going on that they thought might be an auto-immune disease, and her mom had a major heart attack and didn’t seek help for too long. They are both big St Q types themselves, so generous and now they were both too weak to even care for themselves, let alone taking care of each other. So I had St Q there for them, for us, and for more hurricane survivors. (Pat and Mary are both fine now, got well in time to enjoy Christmas, as I recall.)

As usual, I did a little writing on Wilma each day, every time I got a chance. I write with my airpen, using black fabric paint, and then let it dry, coming back later to write some more. Current events, like the indictment of Lewis Libby in the Plamegate affair, are part of this piece. Bush’s usual antics. He went to Argentina and got really protested against. They accused him of war crimes, and they said he’s a fascist like Hitler. He smiled and said that this is good, that they’re allowed to express their opinions, because they live in a democracy. Rosa Parks died during the time I was making this piece, and I was so impressed with the things about her life that I’d never been told, before I Googled her and read her bio. Did you know that she was really, really active in the civil rights movement along with Dr. King? This was about the third time she’d refused to give up her seat, and this time finally it got the results she wanted. And she was already back in the ‘colored section’ of the bus, when that teenage boy told her to get up and give him her seat. I’d learned as a kid in school that she was just a working class woman, so tired out; she refused to get up, in the front of the bus. She was an activist all along! I am glad!

KM: Does “Wilma” reflect your style?

SS: Yes, “Wilma” reflects my current style, which is a combination of emphasis on narrative painted images and written spontaneous diary, along with socio-political commentary. I think my image style has been pretty consistent for many years, but this shift to machine sewing over very detailed surface is the latest change, which began in 2005, with “NEO Buddha,” my first large format quilt made this way. Before that, I’d only made a few small pieces with the unmeasured “crazy grid” machine quilting, and I was usually intensely quilting by hand, with tons of tiny textural stitches, and then beading the daylights out of the pieces.

I got very tired of spending many months to sew and bead one painting into a quilt, unable to paint again, until that piece was done. I felt like I was sitting in a corner, sent there by my self, no one else! People would make comments about an experience we’d had together, saying things like ‘Oh, I bet THIS will end up as a quilt.’ But I’d say, ‘no, it won’t,’ because I had to finish the piece I had about six months to go on first, before I could start another quilt. I knew that I was the only person who’d sent me to sit and sew in that conceptual corner, and I started to realize that good art isn’t defined by how long it takes to make. It’s defined by how good it is, when you look at it.

My job became to make the machine sewn quilts as interesting as the hand stitched and beaded ones are. That’s where my airpen writing really came to be critical in making it work. This writing with fabric paint is such a rich line I don’t have to hand sew over it. So I can write smaller and write a lot more. My writing has become like a stitching texture, in a way. And I’m content to let go of my hand sewing ego. Now I don’t care if people who see my work are aware that I used to put all that time and energy into the hand work.

And a blessing that came out of this more immediate statement type of working is that I can respond to things going on in our world right now, and get the piece done in a short enough time that those issues are still pertinent when people view the finished piece. I am really grateful for that. I think this current style is a natural progression from a very stuck place I wandered into organically, with processes that interested me, but slowed me down, to a place where I could adjust things more to my liking. I am a painter first, then a writer, then a quilter. But I think I’d be really sad if I couldn’t quilt my paintings, had to stretch them on bars and frame them. No, I don’t want to go back to that!

KM: What inspired you to make quilts? Is there quiltmaking in your family?

SS: I grew up with a mother who sewed all the time: our clothes, the upholstery, drapes, etc, etc. Oh, and quilts. I grew up with 4-H and home ec, besides Mom’s wonderful teaching, and she let me cut loose when I was making doll clothes, so that’s when I could go really wild, break the sewing rules, and create weird things to my heart’s content.

But I was mostly drawing, writing, and painting all the time, when I was a little kid. Knitting, too, but I got away from that eventually, probably when I went back to college in my late twenties. Too busy! I had an easel in my bedroom all through junior high and high school, and pretended my bedroom was a “garret,” because that’s where French painters painted, right? I stretched my own canvases all through high school, making some really big stuff. In college I majored in painting, but eventually got pretty sad about how I couldn’t move my paintings around easily, because they were too big to put into anyone’s car. And about then, Miriam Schapiro came to the College of Wooster for a residency, and visited my studio, and we became pen pals. She was going around, advocating that feminists should bring their handwork skills into their studio art, instead of painting like men. Well, it resonated with me, made me realize there was all this stuff I did at home that no one at school ever saw and that if I’d work on UNSTRETCHED canvas, I could roll up my paintings and carry them around.

Once I wasn’t working on stretcher bars, I got to thinking about embroidering on my paintings, and then about quilting them. This was really how I started quilting in my studio, even though I wasn’t at all interested in the tedium of cutting all those templates and lining up all those corners, in traditional quilting, which is what my Mennonite and Amish background quilting was all about. I just wanted to just convert my style of painting that I’d been doing on stretched canvas, to loose fabric. I saw quilting as a way to make a painting I could fold up, carry around, add to, and hang up without a frame. Soon I found out that quilts are also a lot easier to photograph than stretched paintings, and are MUCH easier to ship! What I liked the most a in grad school was that I was the only painting major making these weird fabric things. They had a Surface Design major you could do, but I came in as a painter, and I liked being the unstretched fabric painter. If I’d been in Surface Design, I’d have had to find some other way to be myself, going against the grain.

I had no idea that other women were making these experimental quilts around the country. Miriam Schapiro was nudging feminist artists to use all kinds of women’s work craft skills in their art, but I don’t think any of the rest of her students were doing quilts as art right then. I don’t know really, since we didn’t really have any way to communicate. Then it seemed like, when I found out about Quilt National, right after I did my MFA thesis at Kent State School of Art, a bunch of women artists were doing quite individual things with studio art as quilts. Wow! That was such a revelation, to learn about this whole thing happening at once, in so many unique ways, in the 80s! I think it came out of the Hippie movement as much as Feminism – the two merging. We hippy chicks had to embellish everything we touched!

I have an aunt who still works hard each year for the Mennonite Relief Auction in Kidron, Ohio, in the making of traditional quilts that get auctioned off for disaster relief. They’re the same kind of quilts Mom used to help with at Ladies’ Aid at our church, East Chippewa Church of the Brethren, when I was little. I look at those traditional quilts, and I think of sitting under that quilt frame, watching all those left hands floating along, under the quilt, above me, and wondering how on earth they could make any stitches, when their left hands didn’t even move! That is my first quilt memory! So yeah, maybe they grabbed me right then – the pre-school me! So yeah, it’s in my blood!

KM: Do you think of yourself more as an artist or a quiltmaker or do you even make a distinction?

SS: Yes, I do make that distinction. I’ve always thought of myself as an artist, not as a quiltmaker, and I think that comes from my choice to move my painting surface from stretched canvas to loose fabric, which I soon decided to stitch, back around 1980. And in college I stayed with Painting as my major, without even thinking about how I could switch over to Surface Design, once I got to grad school. Luckily the profs didn’t ask me if I wanted to switch, but then, if they had, I woulda said ‘no.’

I guess it doesn’t really matter what you call yourself. It’s what you do. To me, if you create, use your own ideas to make something, to express yourself, then you’re an artist. I think if you just follow the directions to a T, then you’re a craftsperson. As soon as you decide you hate following someone else’s ideas, and you bust out and do your own thing, there you are. Behold, another artist.

And I think the term “artist” is viewed by our culture as kind of egocentric, like if I say I’m an artist, I’m making some kind of statement about how good my work is. But to me, telling people you’re an artist is no different than telling them you’re a doctor, a bricklayer, a preacher. An artist makes art.

What’s most important to me about my work is the image, and what it communicates. I’ve come full circle in my sewing attitudes: getting more and more into hand work over the years, and finally walking away from the Most Patient Hand Sewing Person Award, and moving to machine sewing. I don’t care now if people even remember that I hand sewed, putting so much time and care into all those intricate textures with embroidery and beads. If I had the money, I might hire someone with one of those huge long-arm machines to take over my crazy grid sewing. Although I do get a big bang out of getting lost in the middle of a quilt and not being sure if I’m sewing straight with the piece or at an angle! Could I give that up? Yeah, I could give it up, because then I could paint more and write more!

KM: What artists have influenced you?

SS: Oh, there have been so many over time, back when I was an official student for all those years! I had my total immersions in Matisse, Egyptian, Picasso, Native American, Chinese, Japanese Ukiyo-e period, more Matisse, more Egyptians, and always children’s art and Outsider art. I’d obsessed on Chinese art so deeply while doing my IS (Independent Study or senior project at the College of Wooster) that people wanted to talk with me about China, when they viewed that work. WHAT? I had been interested in Chinese art because I thought it was so much more nature centered than western art was. I thought it was my feminist stance they should clearly see, through my fanatic use of Chinese art images and even writing characters. Oh, that was my fault, that they thought I was so in love with China and couldn’t see that it was my Nature Centered Feminist style? OK.

I like to think that was the end of my deep drownings into other artists’ styles, and that when I started grad school, I was my own artist, a ball of influences from all the art I had worked my way through by studying it and using its imagery so fully. Now I was a Master’s Candidate, not just your ordinary student anymore, so I had to be ME! But all that stuff was like ingredients in me, the particular unique tossed salad that I am. And I think all easily-identified artists are like that. Call us lint balls, salads, stews, whatever name for a collection of influences, but we come out of those student, searching years as our own selves.

I also had a long period, starting in junior high, when I wanted to only do realism, and I can do that, sort of. I copied from photos for a while, which helped me in some ways, and eventually I got bored with that, too. As an adult I decided that we have cameras for realism, and that I really like children’s art the best of all, so I should probably let myself just draw in a very relaxed way, much of the time, and accept the first version of a drawn form, as my final one. So I don’t erase or use tracing paper, and I work right on the fabric or paper with permanent drawing or painting tools. That’s about the only thing in life that I do where I take big risks and am a dare devil. Ya gotta be wild somehow. Oh, and I chop merrily with scissors without measuring or planning, most of the time, a trait which made my seventh grade home ec teacher call me ‘scissors happy.’ And she was really trying to shame me. She was proper.

My parents had a huge influence on my art, in that my father made a big fuss over my work, and my mother made sure I had art supplies. Dad paid for a three year correspondence course with Art Instruction Schools in Minneapolis, starting when I was in ninth grade. That really showed me that he believed in me, and even when the course drove me nuts, I kept going, because he had put that huge amount of money into my education. I got my diploma from that course in what they then called Commercial Art, plus an extra certificate in Illustration, when I was 16. It really taught me that I didn’t want to ever be a graphics artist! Too tight!!!!

KM: Describe your studio.

SS: Hmm. My studio is all over the place, with the computer stuff and photo shoot wall both in what could be a dining room, much storage of work in spare bedrooms, and so on. But my REAL studio is in the basement, in what was a rec room when we bought this house in 1990.

It’s about 16 x 20, I think, but would be about twice that, if the builder had blasted more rock and not put in a 4′ high crawl space under the living and dining rooms, but instead, had made that area more basement! How I long for that giant mole that digs out the rest! A dehumidifier runs all summer in my studio, even when we have the AC on. I am devoted to nice, dry basements. And well lit ones.

I have way too much clutter down there at this point, and a lot of supplies left over from when I was beading everything, but I do hope to really clean it out this winter and have more room to breathe. Hard to believe I used to have up to five students down there for five day live-in art camps! We got a lot of mileage out of my big work table, which is just two sixties wooden closet doors, set up side by side on saw horses, so they become a gigantic table. A couple of smaller tables, a sewing machine cabinet with my 1990 Pfaff on it. A pretty fake oriental carpet hiding some of the really ugly base carpet. Music plays sometimes, but I like to listen to books on tape, during times when I don’t have to think much while working, and sometimes it’s just NPR. Sometimes the studio is peacefully quiet.

Tie dyed orange and yellow fabric panels hide a terrible mess on huge shelves, so at least I have that color to enjoy! Oh, when it’s all shoveled out, how I will dance down there! I have lots of fabrics that I keep folded in sorted piles in shelves, but the finished art pieces are on the main floor of our house, in storage bins.

I work mostly at the big table, whether it’s covered with plastic and then old sheets, as drop cloths, so I can paint on it, or when it’s all down to the wood again, when I move my Pfaff over to it, so I can wrestle these big quilts, sewing my unmarked grids at random, carefully stopping to remove many little safety pins that hold the layers together for basting.

Oh, we also have an airbrush room that Jimmy and I share, in between our individual studios. I usually start my pieces in there, with my whole cloth white cotton pinned up on the paint wall, making my base drawing with black airbrush lines, which are thicker than my airpen lines that I write with, back in my studio later, with the big cotton panel laying down flat on the drop cloth. I usually paint in the colors with the airbrush, too, before going into the main studio to airpen and brush paint. In my studio, on the big table, is where I run my airpen, carefully folding or turning the big panel of painting, to not smear the wet fabric paint just written on with the tiny syringe needle of the airpen, by accidentally dragging the airline through that wet paint. It has happened! So have big disasters, like having the whole paint cartridge blow out of the airpen once, plopping black fabric paint all over part of the written-on painting. I fixed that. I am determined!

There is often our sweet old black lab girl dog, Hattie Clementine Spooler, lounging on my studio rug, in her spot, and sometimes our girl cats, too: Marigold and Evil Tulip. My studio would be so much easier to keep clean without these joyful ladies, but there they are.

I have a big clothesline that runs diagonally through my studio, so I can put up work to stare at. You cannot put brush painted paintings with fabric paint up vertically to dry, as the paint will just soak down and drip off! But airbrushed paintings, which are more on-the-surface and therefore, more dry from the start, can be pinned up. So can towels from washing my hair in the laundry room around the corner, which by the way is where the water is at for all of our studio work, including Jimmy’s leather work and our airbrush work.

I see a lot of gorgeous new studios out there, and that would be really cool to have. If we got to where we couldn’t go downstairs, I guess we’d just work up here in the living room, etc, and ditch the furniture! You always find a way! But for now, the basement is nice, because it’s cooler in the summer, and you can leave a mess longer, only that’s not good!

KM: What advice would you offer someone starting out?

SS: I’m assuming you mean an artist starting out as a professional in our field, doing this for a living. I’d advise them to talk to plenty of people doing art quilts as a career, so to do that, I’d tell them to sign up for the Quilt Art email listserv, at http://www.quiltart.com, and to get the lists as digests, so their inbox isn’t clogged with a bunch of individual emails. Then introduce themselves on the list, and maybe ask for a couple of pen pals to network with, mentors.

That list has over 3,000 people on it, from all over the world, though mostly the US. Extremely sharing people. There’s so much to be said for not having to invent all these wheels all over again. So getting into some networking would be my first advice, and then try to start a support group in your own area, so you can meet regularly with four to six other quilt artists in your area. When I moved part time to the west side of Cleveland, to take care of Eva, I was so fortunate to have a little group develop there, thanks to Tina Rossi-Petrone, from the Quilt Art list. I’d been used to my all-media art group here in my town, and now I had these fiber artists to share work and ideas with in Cleveland, too. We are the West End Textile tArts, or the tArts. Just a tiny group, but what joy and power we have in supporting each others’ efforts. You can’t imagine how much easier and more interesting it is to make your art and get it out, when you have friends in the same boat to interact with. Locally to globally, network!

Experiment a while, take some classes if you like classes, make yourself find serious time to work regularly, and have some deadlines to get things done. Have a show deadline or two, but don’t try to enter too many shows at first, because you can get overwhelmed by the paperwork, and get depressed from getting rejected, if your work isn’t ready. If the little support group can find a local place for a group show, that’s really super, because then your group has a common cause, and you have a deadline, too.

Oh, and photography! Learn to photograph your work in a serious way, or make sure you can afford to pay a serious photographer to document your work. Give yourself enough time before each show deadline, etc, to photograph the work well, so you never have to send out work that needs to be reshot. And keep good records, right from the start. Keep track of all your commitments, where your work is going, when it’s coming back. It’s a lot!

Get enough sleep. Don’t eat in your studio, and marry a rich art patron. Did I say that?

KM: You sure did and it gave me a good laugh.

SS: Oh, I said that about marrying a rich patron, because people need to realize that this is not a profession you go into, expecting to be able to support yourself in the normal American lifestyle! Tomorrow I’ll happily talk about Jimmy and my relationship. He was a welder when we met, soon to be a full time artist. Since we’re both artists, and neither of us has a sugar spouse, we remind ourselves of our glorious flexitime and other bennies of being independent, since big moola has so far eluded us!

KM: And did you marry a rich art patron? Actually, I’d like you to talk about your relationship with your husband and your art.

SS: My relationship with Jimmy and our art – his, mine, and ours – are very entwined. I think we’ve collaborated on everything we’ve done, and I can’t imagine it any other way. But it’s a big house, and we just drift in and out of each other’s spaces all day. We’ve never worked side by side at one work table all day. We both like and need our own space, but we fill in gaps for each other when we get stuck anywhere in our processes or have dilemmas to work through.

When we met, he started saying how much he wished he could make leather stuff, over and over, and I kept telling him to just do it. So he did. He went to work, made himself some crude tools, used a pair of old boots for his first projects, and before long, had a little studio set up next to mine in our old commune. 1977. I got to helping him on leather orders, making custom leather clothes for a few years, then helping him learn to make garments, when I didn’t have time to sew them anymore, being back in college.

In 1989 he started helping me with my quilts by adding leather forms to them, when I was getting teaching offers that let me travel, and I could see his longing. I suggested that his leather would be a great addition to my work, and he started teaching with me. He taught himself and later me, to airbrush, and he taught that in our classes.

In 1996, when he started fly fishing, he started fading away from helping me with my art and teaching, because he was now doing custom leather orders for fly fishermen, and THAT was it. He’d found his real calling! Now when I teach, it’s just me going, but I’m not teaching much right now, because I want to really focus on my studio work. Jimmy and I still help each other on our work, but not enough to call it collaboration now. I design his three-letter monograms he hand carves onto the backs of most of his cases and help him with composition and painting. He helps me right back. When one of us is away from home, the other always notices how empty the house seems. We don’t like it.

That crack I made about how the new quilt artist should marry a rich art patron, well, that was just to remind people that it’s hard to make money at this art making stuff. Jimmy doesn’t support me, but his orders are pulling us through my dry spot right now, and I’ve done it for him, too. I was thinking that marrying a guy who owns a diamond mine might work, too!

KM: Have you ever used quiltmaking to get through a difficult time?

SS: Yes, I’ve often used art for therapy, and the biggest example is when my mother died. She’d had Alzheimer’s for so long, couldn’t talk for the last few years of her life, and had almost died of pneumonia twice before she really did die in October, 2001. But I wasn’t ready for it. Are you ever? I had a little solo show coming up in a month and a half, and I’d planned to make some paintings on 18 x 24″ stretched canvases, one for each sign of the zodiac, with St Quilta the Comforter, my character, as the woman in each painting.

I started the painting project four days after Mom died. And in painting Aries, it really hit me hard that Mom had been the model for St Q all along. Maybe I sorta knew that before, but now I was going over Mom’s kitchen tools in my head, trying to think of how to draw the Aries kitchen. After Aries, I put cat eye glasses on Mom, remembering a pair of glasses she had for a while, and I painted St Quilta’s face to look like Mom’s. When I came to each next sign in the zodiac, I would rummage around in my mind, going through Mom’s things again for imagery. And I would use instances in Mom’s life to illustrate the paintings.

I got them all done in time to make a little Xerox book about her and the zodiac, and had that printed up at Staples, so I could have the books at my show at the Jewel Heart Tibetan Buddhist Center in Cleveland. So I really worked like a wild woman, but that intense immersion in my mother’s life really allowed me to wallow in my love for her, my grief of losing her, and my need to honor her. That little book is partly a biography of Mom and partly a lesson in how each sign of the zodiac works.

Later a card company Amber Lotus, found my zodiac paintings on the internet and ended up making greeting cards and a 2005 calendar of their images. You can see all the paintings and their stories on my site at http://www.turtlemoon.com/gallery/zodiac.htm.

KM: Unfortunately we need to end our interview as I am leaving for Kyrgyzstan. I want to thank you for taking these few days to share with me. It’s been wonderful. We concluded our interview on October 5, 2006. Susan, thank you so much.

SS: Good luck! Bon voyage. Love and thanks.