Susan Spencer Crowe: a playful minimalism

SC: I took three workshops at R&F, after I met [company president] Richard [Frumess], because we had the same contractor. It took me about a year to be able to manipulate the encaustic right. It transforms the cardboard, and has a substance and luminosity. I always study different artists, then teach them to my students. Last summer I looked at Blinky Palermo and Gerhard Richter. I like Blinky for his interaction of color and Richter for the way he uses paint; he’ll use a squeegee from printmaking and drag that to replicate our experience with color in a landscape.

LW: How did moving to the Hudson Valley affect your work?

SC: I took walks in the woods and started thinking about how a walk in nature unfolds. I did a piece in which I set up a landscape with several planes of cardboard, which represented the transitions between different phases of the walk. You start to notice the landforms are really what give the vista its meaning. A certain kind of light backlights the clouds, and the light is golden and it changes. I’ve never been interested in how it looks; I’m more interested in what’s underneath it.

LW: How did this particular body of work evolve?

SC: I made a whole series of different shapes then took the forms for several series from that piece. I was in Michael’s one day and I saw this paper with these prints, so I decided to use four printed materials in the pieces. These are different ways of looking at nature. I’m always experimenting.

The vertical and horizontal forms came out of another piece. I saw the cement silos at the Snyder estate and wanted to make one. The first series I came up with used the ladder and stairways. I did tracks. I look at all kinds of things. I started incorporating the different patterns after looking at my photos from Istanbul. There’ll be wall of a certain kind of tile, then tiles within tiles. In Rome, I walked through the Forum and loved the way one building is right against another.

LW: “Bumble Tumble” — how was that constructed?

SC: I took four pieces of cardboard and slotted them. They were all cutouts from sheet of cardboard I saved, and between them I put another thing, so that I created a series of ribs all the way around, then connected them.

LW: Your colors are so well balanced.

SC: In order to get a color to work, so one doesn’t dominate, I’m always putting white into certain colors. I’ll get the discards from R&F when a color captures my attention. I came up through the Minimalists and Post-Minimalists, so always in the back in my mind is to keep it simple.

I also allow free-form association to enter the work. Lots of times the piece becomes its own subject matter. I don’t try to force anything. In Zen, you aim in a direction but you don’t have a specific goal, and that’s the way I work. I want to get a feeling of something but don’t know what is till I arrive at it. It always takes pieces that stump me to see where I’m going. There’s a certain amount of planning and then you let the piece happen.

“Encaustic/Form II” is on exhibit through July 24. Gallery at R&F, 84 Ten Broeck Ave.,  Monday-Friday 9-5, Saturday 10-4.