Sequim Studio Tour: Susan Martin Spar, Painter

During the past three weeks, we have been introducing you to the artists that will be participating in this year’s Third Annual Sequim Open Studio Tour. The final artist and studio that we’ll be visiting today is my own. While I have little difficulty in singing the praises and lauding the talents of other artists, it’s a bit more difficult to look in the mirror. So I asked my good friend, Coffee Miklos (another artist on this tour) to write my article for me. He was gracious, as always, and agreed to do so.

“Susan Martin Spar was born and raised in New York where she received her early training from The Fashion Institute of Technology before moving to southern California in the 1980’s and then eventually to the Olympic Peninsula in 2004. Frequent trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a young girl and her fascination with the work of the Dutch and Flemish masters left a deep and lasting impression and influence both Susan’s choice of subject matter as well as her style.

“My first experience with Susan Spar was a demonstration she was giving some three years ago.  I was at once impressed with her focus and discipline.  She organized her canvas within a rigid grid work of lines and gradients.  This was quickly followed by a fast tonal under painting of earth tones.  These vague swirling outlines of color and values quickly began to change the two-dimensional surface of the canvas into a three dimensional virtual space.  Now the major players in her still life began to coalesce within this space with seeming ease.

“She then organized her palette with first the colors of the still life and secondly with the colors of the dynamics that she wanted to bring out.  It was not unlike watching clouds form and reform images only these swirls and hints were being directed by a determined hand.  Make no mistake, there were no haphazard events taking place here.  Her use of color and light guide your eye over the entire surface of the painting. You can see a demonstration of this technique, as well as follow a lesson on it, by clicking here or see a slide show of an actual demonstration that Susan did for a Sequim Arts Meeting.

“After recently visiting Susan’s new studio I came to realize that this same determination continues in her workspace as well.  Susan’s studio has an extraordinary warm and rich feeling that permeates the immediate atmosphere.  The dark wooden floor at once has a subduing effect on ones nature. There is a formal and purposeful feeling to the room.

Here and there on shelves and on virtually every horizontal surface you’ll find brass, silver and exquisitely glazed ceramic vessels as well as fine-grained hand rubbed wooden objects. Susan loves to joke that, ‘People keep giving me things that have to be polished.’ These are the fodder for her next still life painting.  Here in the center of the east wall stands, or I should say hangs her ‘tower of flowers.’  Yes it’s a tall rotating buffet of silk flowers of all sorts of sizes, shapes and colors.  I remarked ‘It’s like a wedding arrangement on steroids’ but it gives her easy access to her flower props and is quickly pulled up and out of the way when not needed.

“A gothic arched window that fills the room with perfectly balanced north light dominates the end wall of the long spacious studio.  The arch at the top of the window has a romantic formality about it that was not missed by me.  Susan watched me study the window and quickly added, ‘It’s that cool steady, Vermeer light that I crave for my work.’  Again what I saw in her is control and mastery of her craft.  Vermeer was a patriarch of the Dutch artist culture during the 17th century.  He was himself a demanding student of the art of light.  He was known for building rooms with a predominant light source so that he could study the play of light over surfaces.  Here in Susan’s studio she has architecturally supplied herself with a similarly controlled illuminating atmosphere.

“Susan rolled her eyes towards the ceiling and raised her eyebrows to direct my attention up. Hanging from the ceiling there is an array of stage lighting.  Susan added, ‘I use the Parr theatre lights to supply additional drama for models when needed.’  This artist studio is a joy to be in and one could easily say it’s where light and Susan get together and play.  As she sat at her easel again she seemed to reflect for just a moment and with a hint of resolve she added, ‘Whenever I’ve tried my hand at other art forms, no matter how much pleasure I get from them and no matter how good I may find I am at them, I always return to painting. I’m a painter – plain and simple.’

“Susan paints both in Oil and Pastel and is interested in a wide variety of subjects from still life to landscape and the figure.  She has participated in both juried and open exhibitions winning numerous awards for both her pastels and oils.  Her work hangs in both private and public collections throughout the U.S., Asia and Australia including the Heritage Park Museum in Corona, CA, a public installation through The Painted Ponies Project in Temecula, CA and the Millard Sheets Foundation in Pomona, CA. You can visit her work on line at www.susanspar.com. Susan also has two blogs: a teaching blog  which features her painting lessons and a daily painting blog .  Come and join Susan and bask in the soft north light of Vermeer that is still revered in this corner of the Peninsula.” – Article by Coffee Miklos

This concludes our series on the upcoming Third Annual Sequim Arts Open Studio Tour. I hope you’ve enjoyed the virtual tour of the studios of this year’s featured artists and I sincerely hope you will take the time on July 17th, 18th, and 19th to visit them in their studios and perhaps pick up a treasured piece of art or two. For more information and directions to the artists’ studios, visit http://sequimarts.org/news/shows/sudio-tour-2009/.