Today we’d like to introduce you to Susan Sensemann.
Susan, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
My ‘brief story’ is 63 of 68 years long – I recognized that I would be a painter in 1954 when my mother took me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A straight trajectory propelled me through Syracuse University where I majored in printmaking to Tyler School of Art in Rome as a junior and then Tyler for graduate school. As one of three hires in 1973 (the woman) by faculty at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, I was tenured by 30 and supported by a marvelous group of male colleagues who encouraged me to revise the drawing curriculum as I saw fit. In 1981, pregnant with my first child, I moved to Chicago and with some frustration began the tenure and promotion process again at the University of Illinois at Chicago where I also held administrative posts until I retired in 2010. I have made art, curated exhibitions, and lectured at numerous institutions here and abroad. Recent endeavors include writing erotic poetry based on the “romance” stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne and fiction – 56 chapters to date about a man named Godwin Joseph Gates who is an amalgam of my grandfather (a professor of English at Amherst, Columbia and the University of Michigan), my mentor (Richard Callner) and me. A little Leonard Cohen, sculptor Lindsay Daen, and Sam Shepard are in the mix. My character is a wordsmith, a man obsessed with making art, a traveler, and a lover of women as a subject rather than the object. How he meets his demise is yet to be seen.
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
In 1974, my painting shifted from hyper-realism of dense foliage to abstraction. Complex and suffocatingly obsessive marks broadened into planes and referred to orthogonal perspective in ukiyo-e prints and the sweeping stylized gestures of kabuki performance. In the mid-80s, I based hundreds of oil on canvas, watercolors, pastels and oil pastels on the structural and architectonic systems in pre-Renaissance works by Duccio, Lorenzetti, and Fra Angelico among others. Despite ardent agnosticism, I was searching for God in science as well as painting. Oil and oil pastel diptychs and triptychs elaborated physics diagrams in the late 80s- another way to structure form and maintain agitated marks within the planes. An extensive series of large triptychs in the early 90s depicted targets and depended on installation with a raking light. The oils appear ephemeral from the front and highly structured from the side. In 600 or so collages of fragments of print materials, I literally excised women from the context of a text. That body was followed by another 500 or so non-digitally produced photomontages in which my face morphs with other subject matter such as garden gnomes, Czech glass, and bodhisattvas I photographed in Thailand and Bhutan. I have been skewing the masculinist grid for many years: recent work is feminist, gothic and dizzyingly baroque. My Buddhist practice has helped me clarify the purpose of the grid as “Indra’s Net” – a visualization of interconnectedness. In addition to a new body of drawings and paintings, I am making mandalas of sand and plants in the tradition of Tibetan sand mandalas. Each is meticulously installed, swept up, placed in a basket, and released into a nearby body of water – ocean, lake, pond, river to transform with the ripples and tides.
How can artists connect with other artists?
Collaborate! Give up the reins and enjoy learning from others. Try something you are afraid of doing. Do not paint the same painting for 40 years. Enjoy knowing that your creative mind allows you to turn on a dime.
Listen to music you don’t like. Get up from your desk/easel every hour and dance. Move your body and let your mind follow. Breathe, stomp, sway, breathe more.
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
My website is www.susansensemann.com.
I post art, art and Buddhist-related images on Instagram daily.
I have a studio and storage space with hundreds of paintings, drawings, photomontages, some sculpture, and 76 artist notebooks full of lists, ideas, plans, dreams, and annotations. What an artist of a certain age does with her remaining 63 years of art-making is a mystery, a burden, and a tear and laughter-filled dilemma. A recent count of my bodies of work since 1973 comes in at 33: each distinctly different in medium and concept, all obsessive, dense, agitated and pertaining to the minuscule shifts in the importance of leaf to leaf, line to line that we falsely assume matter. I am embarking on a “side hustle” that belies the source within Buddhist tradition: making mandalas for any occasion and photographing the swirl and disappearance of matter as form transforms into emptiness.
I am teaching mindfulness meditation, Focusing, and compassionate communication at the Zen Life and Meditation Center, Chicago where I can be located ringing bells to keep time during meditation sessions, raising funds for a permanent space, and engaging with people and ideas that suit my curiosity and need to move my mind and open my senses.
Contact Info:
- Address: Susan Sensemann
207 Park Ave
River Forest, IL 60305 - Website: www.susansensemann.com
- Email: ssense@uic.edu
- Instagram: susansensemann
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