Studio Visit
Susanna Heller in conversation with ERIC GELBER
Susanna Heller
The walls of Susanna
Heller's modestly sized studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn are covered with
drawings and the paintings she is currently working on. Each painting
has a number of drawings stuck behind and to the sides of it. Heller
composes her paintings by synthesizing elements from many different
drawings. It is a distillation process. She has worked here since 1994.
Even though she says that, "I was madly in love with New York City
as a little tiny girl," she didn't take it up as a subject until
1985.
Heller was born
in Manhattan but her family moved to Canada when she was seven. She
said it was painful to be torn away from the city she loved. It all
started at the MoMA: "I started drawing and painting as a little
girl. Picasso did it to me. "Guernica" was still at the Modern
at that time. It was the old Modern, the beautiful old Modern, which
I still miss. My parents would leave me on the bench with the guard
watching me and they would go off to see the special exhibits. And I
would sit there like I was watching a movie. I could tell you everything
about that painting."
Susanna Heller Up
into Thin Air 2003
oil and mixed media on canvas, 48 x 48 inches
Courtesy of the Artist
Two things are
essential to Heller's art; the sketches she makes during her daily walks
or perceptual journeys from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back, and the
act of walking itself. Although specific structures or views are essential
to Heller's art her imagery is abstract. There is a free floating quality
to her imagery. She captures the energy of the roving gaze, the feeling
we experience as our gaze travels great distances and traces forms,
as if our eyes were drawing implements. She is obsessed with the way
our gaze takes in complex structures that are near and far, simultaneously.
Heller seeks out structures that allow light to pass through them or
heavily reflect light, scaffolding, bridges, and buildings with rows
of windows, because she is fascinated by the way weather and light interact
with solid matter. She chooses not to simply paint objects because she
wants to engage all of our senses. She often includes images of the
same structure seen from different angles in one image. This forces
viewers to reorient themselves when standing before her work. She is
drawn to strong verticals, or objects that contain a prominent linear
rhythm, like the steel cables that hold up suspension bridges or street
lights that are gracefully sloping inverted Ls that seem to defy gravity.
Heller is interested
in the way forces interact, how the transitory face of the sky changes
the demeanor of solid objects. Her skies are liquidy, sooty, one could
say corrosive. Heller's imagination is drawn to the sky, the clouds,
the streaks of airborne rust orange and brown and gray pollution that
mysteriously coast over the tops of buildings. She is not interested
in volumes, but in the countless number of verticals and horizontals
one finds in Manhattan. Her expressive lines compress, elongate, and
blend actual spaces that are transformed by her imagination. In one
portion of the canvas we see something straight on from a distance,
and in another area of the same work there might be an overhead view
or ground view of a tall structure. Heller uses abstraction to incorporate
many different perspectives and experiences into the same painting.
"I make drawings
in paint." Heller more or less paints with small to medium sized
paint strokes, and this lends an astounding clarity to the jumble and
chaos of the lines and moody colors in her work. Heller's paintings
are ecstatic confluences, the product of keen observation and emotionally
charged memories. Her abstractions avoid obscurity because recognizable
signifiers are always present. They are put together over a long period
of time, and the viewer can get lost in her paintings because there
are so many nuances to appreciate and the carefully built up layers
of paint reveal themselves slowly through time.
Movement is essential
to Heller's work. The act of walking is a form of meditation for her.
"I can't think straight until I'm moving, my eyes are moving and
my head's somewhere else." Heller returns to sites over and over
again and draws them from different angles. "I'll notice a place
or a direction, a convergence, a clustering of things, someplace along
the way, or something about a place. And I'll just start drawing all
around it, drawing parts and wholes." She loves dramatic perspectives,
looking down the length of train tracks until they disappear into the
horizon, looking at the city skyline from the Brooklyn Bridge, looking
down the length of the South Tower from the 91st floor of the North
Tower. Heller's imagery is all about flux. You are never quite sure
if her agitated surfaces represent the rebirth or destruction of her
subject(s). She juxtaposes multiple views of different structures that
overlap and are melded together through a meticulously wrought linear
structure, and the pulsing sky holds it all together.
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Susanna Heller
left: Cruel Blue 2002, oil on linen, 66 x 24 inches
right:
Ghost Tower 2003, oil and rice paper on linen and canvas,
144 x 57inches
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The German composer
Karlheinz Stockhausen said that the destruction of the WTC was "the
greatest work of art in the cosmos." If he meant that it planted
more unforgettable images into the psyches of people than any work of
art could, he was right. Heller is the only artist I know of who has
dealt with the tragedy over an extended period of time, and has created
complex, ambiguous, emotional, and lyrical imagery relating to it. Heller's
memories of the destruction of the Twin Towers have haunted her and
her imagery. The titles of many of her post 9/11 works reveal a mind
that is pained by a traumatic event: "Fractured Ascension,"
"Haunting," "Cruel Blue," "Ghost Tower,"
"Up Into Thin Air," "Black Cloud. Explosion. Absence.,"
"Haunting," "Yellow Ruins and Black," "Tower
of Blue and Ruin," "Three Days After," "Cloud Carrying
Fragments." All of these paintings contain traces of the towers
seen from many different angles and during different phases of their
destruction. She has fixated on the collapse of the towers, the moment
when the planes crashed into the buildings and the sickly black and
gray plumes of smoke that poured out of the blackened holes. Many of
the paintings of the WTC are painted on asymmetrical surfaces that are
roughly pieced together. This emphasizes a sense of rupture and the
tenuousness of the post 9/11 world.
Heller experiments
with color. She will cut off dried globs of paint from canvases and
her palette and stick them on to surfaces in order to disrupt things
and suggest different kinds of space. In a painting like "Up Into
Thin Air," (2003) Heller focuses on the moment of impact, when
one of the planes hit the tower and, as a survivor who was a few floors
below the impact said, "chunks of building flew out into space."
Even though Heller said that, "I use color for it's physical presence
rather than for its local color," this painting of the deceptively
calm blue sky of 9/11, and the multi-hued plumes of smoke dotted with
flying debris that could have included human remains is powerful because
of her intense observation and memories of atmospheric phenomena, and
the care Heller took to evoke reality. "Well I never learned so
much about blue until after 9/11. It was so hard to work on capturing
the perfect sky blue from the fall of 2001. You have to put shit-loads
of blues on of every kind. You're painting the oppressiveness of perfect
deep blue sky. You're painting deep space." The ironic and sad
thing is that Heller is not represented by a New York gallery and her
profound discoveries and insights can't be seen regularly in the city
that inspired them.
Her current paintings
include found objects, scraps of detritus she finds on her walks. Her
inclusion of these is a quasi-religious gesture, a communion. It is
another way of bringing herself closer to the city she loves, of becoming
one with it. Heller invests her images with a nervous erotic energy.
She lovingly paints the sky and urban landscape as if they were flesh.
She has wanted to paint people for many years, but has only done so
once, in her self portrait "City on My Mind," (1995). In this
painting she literally melds the New York City skyline and the top of
her head into one painterly field of exuberance and energy. Like Van
Gogh's landscapes and Soutine's still-lifes, Heller's canvases radiate
with animistic energy. Everything she paints has a life of its own,
and her fertile imagination is fueled by observation. Heller has achieved
a wonderful selflessness, unique in this day and age, because she feels
at home in the anonymous urban environment. The words Bauldelaire used
to describe the perfect flâneur apply to Heller: "We might
liken [her] to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope
gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and
reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all
the elements of life. [She] is an 'I' with an insatiable appetite for
the 'non-I', at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures
more living than life itself, which is always unstable and fugitive."
